Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism

Charles Johnson (2006/2008)

Reprinted with permission of the Publishers from Liberty, Equality, Solidarity: Toward a Dialectical Anarchism in Anarchism/Minarchism, ed. Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan (Ashgate, 2008). pp. 155-188. If you reprint this article, please retain this attribution.

The purpose of this essay is political revolution. And I don’t mean a
“revolution” in libertarian political theory, or a revolutionary new political
strategy, or the kind of “revolution” that consists in electing a cadre of new
and better politicians to the existing seats of power. When I say a
“revolution,” I mean the real thing: I hope that this essay will contribute to
the overthrow of the United States government, and indeed all governments
everywhere in the world. You might think that the argument of an academic essay
is a pretty slender reed to lean on; but then, every revolution has to start
somewhere, and in any case what I have in mind may be somewhat
different from what you imagine. For now, it will be enough to say that I intend
to give you some reasons to become an individualist anarchist,[1] and undermine some of the
arguments for preferring minimalist government to anarchy. In the process, I
will argue that the form of anarchism I defend is best understood from what
Chris Sciabarra has described as a dialectical orientation in social
theory,[2] as part of a larger effort to
understand and to challenge interlocking, mutually reinforcing systems of
oppression, of which statism is an integral part—but only one part among others.
Not only is libertarianism part of a radical politics of human liberation, it is
in fact the natural companion of revolutionary Leftism and radical feminism.

My argument will take a whole theory of justice—libertarian rights
theory[3]—more or less for granted: that is, some
version of the “non-aggression principle” and the conception of “negative”
rights that it entails. Also that a particular method for moral inquiry—ethical
individualism—is the correct method, and that common claims of collective
obligations or collective entitlements are therefore unfounded. Although I will
discuss some of the intuitive grounds for these views, I don’t intend to give a
comprehensive justification for them, and those who object to the views may just
as easily object to the grounds I offer for them. If you have a fundamentally
different conception of rights, or of ethical relations, this essay will
probably not convince you to become an anarchist. On the other hand, it may help
explain how principled commitment to a libertarian theory of rights—including a
robust defense of private property rights—is compatible with struggles
for equality, mutual aid, and social justice. It may also help show that
libertarian individualism does not depend on an atomized picture of human social
life, does not require indifference to oppression or exploitation other than
government coercion, and invites neither nostalgia for big business nor
conservatism towards social change. Thus, while my argument may not
directly convince those who are not already libertarians of some sort,
it may help to remove some of the obstacles that stop well-meaning Leftists from
accepting libertarian principles. In any case, it should show non-libertarians
that they need another line of argument: libertarianism has no necessary
connection with the “vulgar political economy” or “bourgeois liberalism” that
their criticism targets.

The threefold structure of my argument draws from the three demands made by
the original revolutionary Left in France: Liberty, Equality,
and Solidarity.[4] I will argue that, rightly
understood, these demands are more intertwined than many contemporary
libertarians realize: each contributes an essential element to a radical
challenge to any form of coercive authority. Taken together, they undermine the
legitimacy of any form of government authority, including the
“limited government” imagined by minarchists. Minarchism eventually requires
abandoning your commitment to liberty; but the dilemma is obscured when
minarchists fracture the revolutionary triad, and seek “liberty” abstracted from
equality and solidarity, the intertwined values that give the demand for freedom
its life, its meaning, and its radicalism. Liberty, understood in light of
equality and solidarity, is a revolutionary doctrine demanding anarchy,
with no room for authoritarian mysticism and no excuse for arbitrary dominion,
no matter how “limited” or benign.

Liberty

Individual liberty is essential to political justice
for both minarchist and anarchist libertarians. Both understand political
liberty as freedom from organized coercion: force, under libertarian theory, can
only be legitimate in defense of an individual person’s
liberty, never when initiated against those who have not trespassed
against any identifiable victim. Libertarians often draw boundaries between
liberty and invasion through the principle of self-ownership: you are
rightly your own master, and nobody else, individually or collectively, is
entitled to claim you as their property.[5] That
includes governments: self-ownership is held to be unconditional and
“prepolitical,” in that it does not depend on the guarantees of political
constitutions or legislation, but rather logically precedes them and
constrains the constitutions and legislation that can legitimately be
established. Thus anarchists and minarchists agree that political power should
be subordinated to the principle of self-ownership, and everyone left alone to
do as she pleases with her own person and property provided she respects the
same freedom for others. But they disagree over what these principles entail.
Minarchists argue that the rights of liberty and self-defense, delegated and
institutionalized, establish the legitimacy of a “night-watchman”
State,[6] limited by a written constitution
and devoted to the rule of law. For anarchists, the rights of liberty and
self-defense expose even the “night-watchman” State as professionalized
usurpation, and reveal all government laws and written constitutions as mere
paper without authority. Such a conflict demands explanation, and clarification
of the terms of the dispute.

I won’t hazard a definition of either “government” or “state” here,
but some essential features can be described. States have governments, and
governments, as such, claim authority over a defined range of territory
and citizens. Governments claim the right to issue legitimate orders to
anyone subject to them, and to use force to compel obedience.[7] But
governments claim more than that: after all, I have the right to order
you out of my house, and to shove you out if you won’t go quietly. Governments
claim supreme authority over legally enforceable claims within
their territory; while I have a right to order you off my property, a government
claims the right to make and enforce decisive, final, and exclusive orders on
questions of legal right[8]—for example, whether it
is my property, if there is a dispute, or whether you have a right to
stay there. That means the right to review, and possibly to overturn or punish,
my demands on you—to decisively settle the dispute, to enforce the
settlement over anyone’s objections, and deny to anyone outside the
government the right to supersede their final say on it. Some
governments—the totalitarian ones—assert supreme authority over every
aspect of life within their borders; but a “limited government” asserts
authority only over a defined range of issues, often enumerated in a
written constitution. Minarchists argue not only that governments should be
limited in their authority, but specifically that the supreme authority of
governments should be limited to the adjudication of disputes over individual
rights, and the organized enforcement of those rights. But even the most minimal
minarchy, at some point, must claim its citizens’ exclusive
allegiance—they must love, honor and obey, forsaking all others, or else
they deny the government the prerogative of sovereignty. And a
“government” without sovereign legal authority is no government at all.

Authority, in the political sense, is correlative with
deference. Insofar as Twain is subject to Norton’s authority, Twain is
obliged to defer to Norton’s decisions, and Norton can compel him to obey. But
the sort of deference must be carefully distinguished. Robert Paul Wolff notes that

An authoritative command must … be
distinguished from a persuasive argument. When I am commanded to do
something, I may choose to comply even though I am not being
threatened, because I am brought to believe that it is something
which I ought to do. If that is the case, then I am not, strictly
speaking, obeying a command, but rather acknowledging the force or
rightness of a prescription. … But the person himself [sic]
has no authority—or, to be more precise, my complying with his
command does not constitute an acknowledgment on my part of any such
authority. (1970, 6)

Reason is no respecter of persons, but authority is personal: if
Norton has legitimate authority over Twain, then Twain’s obligation to
defer doesn’t come from the nature of what Norton decided, but from the
fact that Norton decided it.[9] Wolff’s point could be
sharpened by further distinguishing epistemic authority from
imperative authority. There are cases where you should defer to an
authority because she possesses some special expertise on the issue at
hand.[10] But this is more scientific authority than
political authority, and not really what Wolff seems to have in mind. The reason
that lawyers bring their cases before the Supreme Court is not just that the
Nine have some special expertise on the requirements of the law. Maybe they do,
but the reason that others are supposed to defer to their judgment has
to do with the offices they personally hold; their status is
constitutive of the binding force of the judgment. However
expert a mere lawyer may be, her opinion still amounts only to a
brief, not a ruling, unless and until the judge personally
authorizes it. It’s not that the issue lies within the court’s
expertise, but that it (supposedly) lies within their
prerogative.

It is not enough, then, for a minarchist just to postulate an ideal
government that makes some rulings worth enforcing on their own merits.
If a judgment is worth enforcing on its own merits, then it surely is
perfectly legitimate to enforce it, but then the legitimacy comes from the
content of the judgment, not from its source.[11]
That justifies enforcing the judge’s ruling, but it does not establish
that the judge’s authorization confers any special legitimacy on the
enforcement, above or beyond what private citizens could confer, either
individually or cooperatively in private “defense associations,” given enough
wisdom, study, and application. Minarchists need a theory that legitimates
exclusive government authority through the special positions that
government agents occupy, and the sovereign status of the government
they represent. Without one, they have no justification for the special
prerogatives claimed by even the most scrupulously limited of governments.

I claim that minarchists cannot consistently offer the kind of
theory that they need to offer, because no possible theory can connect
sovereign authority to legitimacy, without breaking the
connection between legal right and individual liberty. My case
for this claim consists of three challenges, each developed in the anarchist
literature, which demonstrate a conflict between individual liberty and one of
the forms of special authority that minarchists have traditionally wanted
governments to exercise.[12] Since the clearest expression of the first,
and most basic, challenge is in Roy Childs’s “Open Letter to Ayn Rand,” we might
call it the Childs challenge. Rand argues that a government must be strictly
limited to the defensive use of force in order to be morally distinguishable
from a robber gang.[13] She holds that even the legitimate
functions of a properly limited government must be funded voluntarily
by the governed, condemning taxation in any form.[14] However, she insists
on the legitimacy of sovereignty and explicitly rejects individualist
anarchism.[15] Childs, accepting Rand’s description of a
government as “an institution that holds the exclusive power to
enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical
area,”[16] argues that no institution can claim that
authority and remain limited to the defensive use of force at the same time:

Suppose that I were distraught with the service of a
government in an Objectivist society. Suppose that I judged, being as rational
as I possibly could, that I could secure the protection of my contracts and the
retrieval of stolen goods at a cheaper price and with more efficiency. Suppose I
either decide to set up an institution to attain these ends, or patronize one
which a friend or a business colleague has established. Now, if he [sic] succeeds in setting up the agency, which provides all
the services of the Objectivist government, and restricts his more
efficient activities to the use of retaliation against aggressors, there are
only two alternatives as far as the “government” is concerned: (a) It can use
force or the threat of it against the new institution, in order to keep its
monopoly status in the given territory, thus initiating the use or threat of
physical force against one who has not himself initiated force. Obviously,
then, if it should choose this alternative, it would have initiated force.
Q.E.D. Or: (b) It can refrain from initiating force, and allow the new
institution to carry on its activities without interference. If it did this,
then the Objectivist “government” would become a truly marketplace institution,
and not a “government” at all. There would be competing agencies of protection,
defense and retaliation—in short, free market anarchism. (Childs 1969, ¶ 8)

Rand’s theory of limited government posits an institution with sovereign
authority over the use of force, but her theory of individual rights only allows
for the use of force in defense against invasions of rights. As long as
private defense agencies limit themselves to the defense of their clients’
rights, Rand cannot justify using force to suppress them. But if citizens are
free to cut their ties to the “government” and turn to private agencies for the
protection of their rights, then the so-called “government” no longer holds
sovereign authority to enforce its citizens’ rights; it becomes only one defense
agency among many.[17] Childs formulated his argument as an
internal critique of Ayn Rand’s political theory, but his dilemma challenges
any theory combining libertarian rights with government sovereignty.
Any “limited government” must either be ready to forcibly suppress private
defense agencies—in which case it ceases to be limited, by initiating
violence against peaceful people—or else it must be ready to coexist with
them—abdicating its claim to sovereignty and ceasing to be a government.
Since maintaining sovereignty requires an act of aggression, any
government, in order to remain a government, must be ready to trample the
liberty of its citizens, in order to establish and enforce a coercive monopoly
over the protection of rights.[18]

At this point, some minarchists—most famously Robert
Nozick—accept that a properly limited government cannot simply
suppress competition from rights-respecting defense agencies (without
ceasing to be properly limited), but reply that it can rightfully
constrain competing defense agencies to obey certain norms, and in
particular to respect certain procedural immunities for the accused. A lynch mob
has no right to demand that they be allowed to “compete” with courts; a properly
limited government has the right to prohibit procedures that impose unacceptable
risks of punishment on the innocent.[19] If it can prohibit
unreliable procedures, then it can force defense associations either to adopt
permitted procedures or disband. But then government sovereignty reasserts
itself, as the government becomes “the only generally effective enforcer of a
prohibition on others’ using unreliable enforcement procedures … and …
oversees these procedures” (Nozick 1974, 113–114). If a properly limited
government reserves the right to authorize enforcement by approved defense
agencies, and prohibit enforcement by rogue defense agencies, then it remains
the sovereign authorizer of enforcement, even if it becomes one of many
direct providers.

Governments probably are entitled to forbid enforcement procedures that
violate the procedural immunities due to the accused. But unless the minarchist
introduces some further reason to reserve this prerogative for the
government, the Childs challenge applies as much to the protection of procedural
immunities as to the ordinary protection of rights. If the government has a
right to suppress rogue agencies, then so does anyone, as a matter of
individual self-defense.[20] The universality of the right
draws out a second point. Nozick makes the transition from dominant protective
agency to minimal State by using language that suggests deputizing
private citizens: the government makes a list of who can be trusted to enforce
the law, and if you’re not on the list, then the government will stop you from
taking the law into your own hands. What matters is whether or not the
government has given you permission to act as a law-enforcer. The
picture depends on a blurring of the distinction amongst argument, authoritative
testimony, and prerogative. Defense associations may have the right to stop
other enforcers from using unreliable procedures, but whether a procedure is
unacceptably risky or not is a matter of fact, which can be characterized and
discovered independently of the say-so of the government. The
government’s seal of approval plays no constitutive role in the right
of an agency to use procedures that are demonstrably legitimate, and the
government’s own procedures must be subject to objective criticism as
much as any private enforcer’s. A right to suppress unacceptably risky efforts
at enforcement establishes no right to demand direct oversight of agencies’
procedures,[21] or to suppress “unauthorized” enforcers
simply for not having the official approval of the government.

The language of “permission,” “prohibition,” and “oversight” obscures the
distinction; but in fact the protection of procedural immunities is not properly
understood in terms of giving permission at all, but rather
respecting a general right.[22] The more generally
and impersonally a defense agency specifies its procedural protections, the less
they will resemble anything that could intelligibly be described as “oversight,”
“giving permission,” or , broadly, the exercise of political authority. The more
they resemble interventionist “oversight,” “giving permission,” or political
authority, the more they will tread on the freedom of innocent people to enforce
their own rights using reliable but unofficial procedures. The government in
Nozick’s “minimal State” must either adopt general policies allowing for free
competition without requiring grants of official permission—and once again
ceases to exercise sovereignty—or else it must enforce its demands of oversight
and official approval, even on agencies that are following reliable
procedures—and once again ceases to be limited to defensive uses of force.

There is another possible reply I find more promising—indeed, convincing.
Strictly speaking, Childs’s dilemma applies to only one branch of the
government: he demonstrates that governments cannot claim a monopoly on
enforcing the rights of citizens, i.e., on the executive
functions of government. It establishes that anyone, not just the government and
its official deputies, can enforce citizens’ rightful claims to person and
property. But how is it determined which claims are rightful, and
which claims are baseless? Robert Bidinotto has objected that anarchism
demands not only “’competition’ in the protection of rights,” but also
“’competition’ in defining what ‘rights’ are” (1994, ¶ 20); without a government
established as the “final arbiter on the use of force in society” (1994, ¶ 25),
there is no way to fix objective rules for the assertion of rights, and no
possibility of meaningful settlement of disputes over rights-claims. So even if
a minimal government cannot claim a monopoly on the executive functions, perhaps
a “microscopic” government could claim a monopoly on
legislation.[23]

Provided that the government legislature and government courts do not try to
interfere with protection of rights by private citizens or defense associations,
I cannot see how the Childs challenge could undermine sovereignty over
legislation. But a second challenge, vigorously expressed in the later works of
Lysander Spooner, can. In the “Letter to Grover Cleveland,” Spooner argues that
all legislation is either criminal, tyrannical, or idle:[24]

Let me then remind you that justice is an immutable, natural
principle; and not anything that can be made, unmade, or altered by
any human power. … Lawmakers, as they call themselves, can add
nothing to it, nor take anything from it. Therefore all their laws,
as they call them, – that is, all the laws of their own making, –
have no color of authority or obligation. It is a falsehood to call
them laws; for there is nothing in them that either creates men’s
[sic] duties or rights, or enlightens them as to their duties
or rights. … If they command men to do justice, they add nothing to
men’s obligation to do it, or to any man’s right to enforce it. They
are therefore mere idle wind, such as would be commands to consider
the day as day, and the night as night. If they command or license
any man to do injustice, they are criminal on their face. If they
command any man to do anything which justice does not require him to
do, they are simple, naked usurpations and tyrannies. If they forbid
any man to do anything, which justice could permit him to do, they
are criminal invasions of his natural and rightful liberty. In
whatever light, therefore, they are viewed, they are utterly
destitute of everything like authority or obligation. (1886, ¶¶
4–7)

Minarchists usually agree that governments have no legitimate authority to
command violations of individual rights, or to forbid acts permitted by
individual liberty—the motive for limiting government was the idea that
legitimate political authority only exists within the boundaries drawn by
individual rights. But Spooner’s point about laws that command justice or forbid
injustice—prohibiting murder, theft, rape, etc.—may be harder to grasp. It is,
after all, true that governments and defense associations are perfectly
justified in enforcing those laws. But what must be appreciated here is that the
obligation to follow those laws, and the right to enforce them, derives entirely
from the content of the laws and not their source. The
government is justified in enforcing those laws only because anybody
would be justified in enforcing justice, whether or not self-styled
legislators have signed off on a document stating “Murder is a crime most foul.”
The document itself is idle; it neither obliges nor authorizes anyone to do
anything they were not already obliged or free to do. The government is not so
much making new laws that impose obligations, but (at best!)
making declarations that recognize preexisting
obligations—which could be objectively specified by anyone, with or without
official approval from anyone.[25] Any right to override another’s assessment
would derive from objective and impersonal considerations of justice,
demonstrated through argument or attested on the basis of expertise,[26]not from political prerogatives invested in the so-called legislature.
Anyone, regardless of status, has the right to make correct declarations about
justice, and override or ignore incorrect declarations. With no special
prerogative to establish rights, and no special prerogative to enforce them (as
per the Childs challenge), the claim of “sovereignty” for a “properly limited
government” must involve either usurpation or idle pretense.

That said, I do think that there is one final straw for the
minarchist to grasp, even after the Childs challenge and the Spooner challenge
have been taken into account, relating to a lacuna in Spooner’s account of the
possible relationship between a piece of legislation and the background
principles of justice. Spooner discussed three possible cases: (1) the
legislation may demand something that contradicts what individual
rights require—making it criminal; (2) it may demand something that
exceeds what individual rights require—making it tyrannical; (3) it may
demand something identical to what individual rights require—making it
nugatory. Spooner’s argument presumes that the “prepolitical” framework of
individual rights determines every question of enforceable obligations,
leaving no room for legislators to exercise legitimate prerogative. But while
these options cover the bulk of both the criminal and the civil law, Spooner has
overlooked one important possibility: there may be cases where the principle of
self-ownership does not fully specify how to apply individual
rights in the case at hand.

It may be that respect for individual rights requires that cars going
opposite directions on a highway should drive on opposite sides—so that drivers
will not needlessly endanger each other’s lives. But self-ownership alone surely
has nothing to say about whether motorists should drive on the left or
the right. It requires that some rule be adopted, and that
once adopted, each motorist obey it. But which rule to adopt
is a question that needs to be settled by considerations other than individual
rights. Medieval legal writers described similar cases as reducing the
natural law (in the sense of making it more specific); the idea is to spell out
the details for cases where the principles of natural justice underdetermine the
correct application of individual rights. It may seem, then, that this ekes out
a place for positive law-making in spite of the Spooner challenge: since there
has to be some specification of how to apply rights in these cases, but
more than one specification is compatible with the requirements of individual
rights, a minarchist might think that you need a government to take on the
prerogative of specifying which one to adopt.[27]

If the Childs challenge undermined the executive authority of the
government, and the Spooner challenge undermined its legislative
authority, you might think of this move as preserving judicial
authority for a sovereign government. Sovereignty here means the right to serve
as the final authority on setting out auxiliary principles for applying
individual rights to specific cases where the requirements of self-ownership are
vague or contingent. To be sure, the limits put on the scope of its authority by
the Childs challenge and the Spooner challenge would be severe. The government
would have no executive and no general legislature; it would have no special
privileges to enforce and the scope of its law-making would be limited to
ironing out minor details within a system of obligations almost entirely
predetermined by the non-aggression principle. It would be a sort of
“ultramicroscopic government,” so small that its influence on the specification
and protection of rights could barely be detected at all.

Although I think that the problem of reducing the natural law is one of the
hardest problems for anarchist theory to resolve, I do not think that the
minarchist is actually in a stronger position than the anarchist. The difficulty
for the minarchist solution can be brought out with a final challenge, also from
the works of Lysander Spooner. This second Spooner challenge is expressed most
clearly in No Treason no. 1:

The question still remains, how comes such a thing as “a nation” to exist?
How do millions of men [sic], scattered over an
extensive territory – each gifted by nature with individual freedom; required by
the law of nature to call no man, or body of men, his masters; authorized by
that law to seek his own happiness in his own way, to do what he will with
himself and his property, so long as he does not trespass upon the equal liberty
of others; authorized also, by that law, to defend his own rights, and redress
his own wrongs; and to go to the assistance and defence of any of his fellow men
who may be suffering any kind of injustice – how do millions of such men
come to be a nation, in the first place? How is it that each of them
comes to be stripped of his natural, God-given rights, and to be incorporated,
compressed, compacted, and consolidated into a mass with other men, whom he
never saw; with whom he has no contract; and towards many of whom he has no
sentiments but fear, hatred, or contempt? How does he become subjected to the
control of men like himself, who, by nature, had no authority over him; but who
command him to do this, and forbid him to do that, as if they were his
sovereigns, and he their subject; and as if their wills and their interests were
the only standards of his duties and his rights; and who compel him to
submission under peril of confiscation, imprisonment, and death?

Clearly all this is the work of force, or fraud, or both.

…. We are, therefore, driven to the acknowledgment
that nations and governments, if they can rightfully exist at all, can exist
only by consent. (Section III, ¶¶ 1–6)

Spooner’s aim in No Treason is, famously, to demonstrate that
citizens are only obliged to recognize the sovereign authority when, and only
for as long as, they genuinely, individually consent to recognize its
authority. What I want to draw attention to are the reasons that
Spooner suggests for the requirement. Here, Spooner questions the notion of a
political jurisdiction, asking what by what right some gang
calling itself “the government,” however strictly limited, gains
authority over otherwise unrelated people who never had anything to do with
them? If there is some question of different ways in which rights could be
applied, then what sort of process and what sorts of relationship justify the
special claim that even an ultramicroscopic government would make to establish
their judgment in preference to all the others?

Spooner suggests that genuine, individual consent can explain their authority
over a jurisdiction. Suppose that Twain and Kearney have a dispute over how long
land must be left unused before it can be reclaimed as abandoned property. If
they both agree to turn the question over to Norton and defer to his judgment,
then it’s clear how Norton got jurisdiction over the case: Twain and Kearney
agreed to bind themselves to his judgment. But suppose that Twain and
Kearney never agreed to turn the question over to Norton, perhaps never even had
anything to do with Norton at all. If Norton should insist that they should
still defer to his judgment, because he is the Emperor, then
Norton has the burden of explaining what binds Twain and Kearney to him in such
a way that his judgment is more authoritative than anybody’s arbitrary fiat.
Even if the vague boundary between between Kearney’s and Twain’s claims needs to
be made more precise, where does Norton, specifically, get the right to enforce
his specification, except by consent of the disputing parties?

If consent is the standard, then the consent must be genuine. In
particular, it must be possible to refuse consent, or to
withdraw it later once given.[28] That means that
consent cannot justify any government body claiming permanent and
irrevocable sovereignty. If a court’s jurisdiction depends on the
consent of those who have put themselves under it, then each of those people
must be individually free to take herself out of the jurisdiction and create or
align herself with another jurisdiction. But without consent, it’s hard
to see what distinguishes the government’s assertion of special authority from
arbitrary fiat. If a community has settled on the rule of one year rather than
two for abandonment, the government has no authority to arbitrarily override the
settled conventions. If folks are divided over the right rule to follow, but
have agreed to submit the dispute to some third party whom they trust more than
the government, the government has no authority to butt in to enforce its own
decision over the agreed terms. If folks are divided over the right rule to
follow, and have not made any steps toward resolving the dispute, then the
government has no authority to arbitrarily force itself on them as the
arbiter.[29]

Liberty cannot coexist with government sovereignty, however “limited.” The
claim of sovereignty must be backed up by coercion at some point, given up or
reduced to a vacuous arrangement of words, whether sovereignty is claimed over
the enforcement of rights, the definition of rights, or the
application of rights. Any way you slice it, government sovereignty
means an invasion of individual freedom, and individual freedom means,
ultimately, freedom from the State.

Equality

The standard against which I have been measuring minarchist
governments in each of these three challenges is based on an intuitive notion of
Liberty that I have taken more or less for granted. That might expose me to
allegations that I’ve made my case by misapplying or inflating the concept of
“liberty” beyond the conceptual or material context that gives it meaning. In my
defense, I want to offer some remarks on the conceptual context within which I
think the principles of self-ownership and individual liberty arise, and to
consider two possible objections to the argument of the previous section. First,
it might be held that I have demonstrated a genuine conflict between individual
liberty and government authority, but that coercion is justified in the limited
case of establishing government sovereignty, either because some other important
value is at stake, or else because a little coercion is a necessary evil to
avoid much greater or much worse coercion. Or, it might be held that I have only
seemingly demonstrated a conflict between individual liberty and government
authority by applying the concepts of liberty and coercion outside of the
context within which they are meaningful: in this case, government authority
could not be properly characterized as either “coercive” or
“non-coercive,” perhaps because (for example) notions such as coercion and
freedom are only meaningful within a system of rights, and a system of rights is
only meaningful in the context of a functioning legal system. I think that
either charge reflects a failure to appreciate the conceptual relationship
between the revolutionary demands for Liberty and
Equality.

Attaching my controversial understanding of
liberty to the standard of equality might seem less than
prudent, if my interlocutor is a minarchist libertarian. Modern
libertarians make demands for individual liberty with
passion and urgency; their reaction to demands for social
equality is more often tepid if not openly hostile. Criticism of
social inequality is much more likely to be heard from the mouths of
unreconstructed statists, and “egalitarianism” is hardly a term
of praise in most libertarian intellectual circles. But I shall argue
that equality, rightly understood, is the best grounds
for principled libertarianism. When the conception of individual
liberty is uprooted from the demand for social equality, the
radicalism of libertarianism withers; it also leaves the libertarian
open to a family of conceptual confusions which prop up many of the
common minarchist arguments against anarchism.

My task, then, is to explain what I mean by “equality, rightly understood.” I
certainly do not intend to suggest that liberty is conceptually
dependent on economic equality (of either opportunity or
outcome), or on equality of socio-cultural status.[30]
But the equality I have in mind is also much more substantive
than the formal “equality before the law” or “equality of rights” suggested by
some libertarians and classical liberals, and rightly criticized by Leftists as
an awfully thin glove over a very heavy fist. Formal equality within a statist
political system, pervaded with pillage and petty tyranny, is hardly worth
fighting for; the point is to challenge the system, not to be equally
shoved around by it. The conception of equality that I have in mind has a
history on the Left older and no less revolutionary than the redistributionist
conception of socioeconomic equality. It is the equality that the French
revolutionaries had in mind when they demanded egalité, and which the American revolutionaries had in mind
when they stated:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men [sic] are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and
the pursuit of Happiness. (Jefferson 1776a ¶ 2)

Jefferson is making revolutionary use of concepts drawn from the English
liberal tradition. Equality, for Jefferson, is the basis for
independence, and the grounds from which individual rights
derive.[31] Locke elucidates the concept when he
characterizes a “state of Perfect freedom”—the state to which everyone is
naturally entitled—as

A State also of Equality, wherein all the Power and
Jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another: there
being nothing more evident, than that Creatures of the same species
and rank promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and
the use of the same faculties, should be equal one amongst another
without Subordination or Subjection …. (1690, II. 4. ¶ 2)

The Lockean conception of equality that underwrites Jefferson’s revolutionary
doctrine of individual liberty is, as Roderick Long (2001a) has argued, equality
of political authority. Jefferson and Locke denied, as arbitrary, the
Old Regime’s claim of a natural entitlement to lordship over their fellow
creatures. Ranks of superior and inferior political authority were not
established by natural differences in station or ordained by the will of God
Almighty. Political coercion is the material expression of a claim of unequal
authority: one person is entitled to dictate terms over another’s person and
property, and the other can be forced to obey. Declaring universal equality thus
means denying all such claims of lordship, and, thus, asserting that everyone
has authority over herself, and over herself alone. Equality
is the context within which the principle of self-ownership, and thus the demand
for individual freedom, takes root. This connection can be seen most explicitly
in the second Spooner challenge above. Spooner’s demand to know how free and
independent people are “compacted” together into a State against their will is
intimately connected with the protest against arbitrary assertions of a
right to dominate the affairs of others. Long points out that neither
socioeconomic equality nor formal legal equality “calls into question
the authority of those who administer the legal system; such administrators are
merely required to ensure equality, of the relevant sort, among those
administered. … Lockean equality involves not merely equality
before legislators, judges, and police, but, far more crucially,
equality with legislators, judges, and police” (¶¶ 22–25).
Whether or not Jefferson was right to treat the equality of authority as
self-evident, a minarchist should hardly want to deny that it is
true. The idea that legitimate governments must be constrained by the
non-aggression principle no less than private citizens, and the
individualist conception of rights, seem clearly rooted in the notion
of equal authority.[32]

But whenever a minarchist brandishes equality of authority against statism,
she also undermines her case for any form of State sovereignty.
Considering liberty in light of equality systematically undermines both of the
objections considered above, and justifies the unlimited demand for Liberty that
I have employed. Insofar as the first objection depends on consequentialist
calculation—holding that liberty can be sacrificed either in the name of other
goods, or in the name of maximizing the total amount of liberty going around—it
necessarily conflicts with a demand for equal authority. The objection
presupposes someone to do the consequentialist calculations, supposedly entitled
to treat all goods, no matter whom they belong to, as common booty to
be distributed. By claiming the right to volunteer not only her own
liberty, but also other people’s liberty for sacrificial duty, the
consequentialist exempts herself from the standard of equality,
pretending that she is entitled to stand over everyone and pass judgment on
their liberty, taking some from Peter and rendering some to Paul in the
name of the cause. Equality means that other people’s lives and livelihoods are
not hers to give, no matter the results she might get from it.[33]

The second sort of objection conflicts with equality in a different way. It
suggests, not that someone can legitimately violate one person’s
liberty in order to secure benefits for others, but that the force involved in
establishing sovereignty cannot be assessed under standards of liberty at all,
because the categorization of force as either aggressive or
defensive is only meaningful within the context of a functioning
government legal order. Thus, Bidinotto’s argument (1994) that the demand for
liberty, when applied unconditionally outside the background context of a
limited sovereign government, divorces rights-claims from the “final standard”
to settle them, and degrades into a programme for unrestrained tyranny and civil
war.

But it is Bidinotto, not the anarchist, who strips the concept of liberty out
of its proper context. The objection depends on a particular picture of the
State and its laws, which is as metaphysically illusive as it is captivating.
The State is imagined as a sort of titan standing over civil society,
binding it to its will and acting on it from without. The constraints that a
particular government imposes under the mantle of State authority may be
tyrannical or just, but whether used properly or abused, the peculiar standpoint
and the constraining force of the State seem necessary for any stable social
order, and sufficient to decisively settle disputes just by being asserted.
Since anarchy dispenses with the external constraints of the State, the
minarchist feels that all rights-claims will be left, as it were, hanging in the
air, with no final authority to ground them. It is this mystique of the State
that Randolph Bourne set out to expose by distinguishing amongst the Nation, the
State, and the Government:

The State is the country acting as a political unit, it is the group
acting as a repository of force, determiner of law, arbiter of
justice. … Government on the other hand is synonymous with neither
State nor Nation. It is the machinery by which the nation, organized
as a State, carries out its State functions. Government is a
framework of the administration of laws, and the carrying out of the
public force. Government is the idea of the State put into practical
operation in the hands of definite, concrete, fallible men. It is the
visible sign of the invisible grace. It is the word made flesh. And
it has necessarily the limitations inherent in all practicality.
Government is the only form in which we can envisage the State, but
it is by no means identical with it. That the State is a mystical
conception is something that must never be forgotten. Its glamor and
its significance linger behind the framework of Government and direct
its activities. (Bourne 1919, § 1 ¶¶ 8-9)

Equality of authority dulls the mystical glamor of
State authority. The law is a human institution, and the legitimate
authority of individual rights-claims does not need to be
grounded in the dominance of a sovereign, or proclaimed from a
standpoint beyond the fragile social relationships among
fallible, mortal human beings. A good thing, too, since there is no Olympian standpoint for the State to occupy; governments are
made of people with no more special authority than you or I—even
when they are speaking ex cathedra in the name of the State.
Rights are grounded in the claims that each of us, as ordinary human
beings, are entitled to hold each other to, and are implemented not
by paper laws but by the concrete social and cultural relationships
we participate in. Roderick Long (2008) shows that if the “final
standard” demanded by Bidinotto is the realistic finality
that comes from a broad consensus that an issue has been settled and
should not be revisited, then it can be achieved through anarchist
institutions no less than through a government; if the “finality”
demanded is some sort of self-applying, self-grounding finality
immune to even the possibility of further dispute, then that
is not available even under a government, the mystique of State
authority notwithstanding.[34]
The choice is not between a system where disputes are never
meaningfully settled and one where they are, but between one in which
they are settled through a decentralized network of institutions
holding each other in check, or through a centralized hierarchy
forcing others to defer to it. And, as Long argues, anarchy actually
provides a better hope for disputes to be settled justly
than minarchy—especially when an arbitrator is herself a party to
the dispute—because under anarchy the watchers are themselves
watched, and are less able to force through unjust rulings simply in
virtue of their dominant position.

The context of a concept is often
conceived as a constraint on the concept, and context-dropping as a
matter of applying the concept more widely than it should be
applied. But dropping the context of a concept could make you go
wrong in either of two ways: improper abstraction might
inflate the application of the concept beyond its domain of
significance; or it might conceal the concept’s significance
in cases where it should be applied. Understood in the
context of Equality, the principle of Liberty becomes more
radical, not less, challenging all forms of State mysticism with the
standard of individual sovereignty. Dispelling the mystical
conception of the State also reveals the need for concrete attitudes,
practices and relationships to sustain a free society, not just paper
laws to “limit” tyranny. Which brings me to Solidarity.

Solidarity

I have chosen the word “Solidarity” to stand for a family of
cultural and political commitments usually associated with the
radical Left, among them labor radicalism, populism,
internationalism, anti-racism, gay liberation, and radical feminism.
These commitments share a common concern with the class dynamics of
power and a sensitivity to expressions of non-governmental forms of
oppression. They demand fundamental change in the cultural and
material conditions faced by oppressed people, and propose that the
oppressed organize themselves into autonomous movements to struggle
for those changes. They also emphasize strikes, boycotts, mutual aid,
worker cooperatives, and other forms of collective action, both as a
means to social transformation and also as foundational institutions
of the transformed society once achieved. These shared concerns and
demands have often been summed up in the call for “social
justice”—a slogan assailed by Hayek (1978) and reflexively
associated, by libertarians and state Leftists alike, with expansion
of the anti-discrimination and welfare bureaucracies.

But solidaritarian ends can be separated from
authoritarian means, and the relationship between Liberty and
Solidarity has not always been so chilly. 19th century
libertarians, particularly the individualist anarchists associated
with Benjamin Tucker’s magazine Liberty, identified with the
cultural radicalism of their day – including the labor movement,
abolitionism, First Wave feminism, freethought, and “free love.”
Indeed, while Tucker described his position as “Absolute Free
Trade; … laissez faire the universal rule” (1888, ¶ 21),
he and his circle routinely identified themselves as socialists—not
to set themselves against the ideal of the free market, but
against actually existing big business. They argued that
plutocratic control over finance and capital was the creature of, and
the driving force behind, government economic regimentation and
government-granted monopolies.[35]
The Tuckerite individualists saw the invasive powers of the State as
intimately connected and mutually reinforcing with the exploitation
of labor, racism, patriarchy, and other forms of oppression, with
governments acting to enforce social privilege, and drawing
ideological and material support from existing power dynamics.[36]
From their point of view, attacking statism alone, without addressing
the broader social context, would be narrow and ultimately
self-frustrating.

Today the leading intellectual force in the
effort to connect libertarianism with a comprehensive vision of human
liberation is Chris Sciabarra,[37]
who has advanced the argument in a series of books and articles over
the past two decades, most extensively in his “Dialectics and
Liberty” trilogy (1995b,
1995a,
2000). Sciabarra persuasively
advocates a dialectical orientation in libertarian social
thought, which attends not only to the structural dynamics of statism
but also to the extragovernmental context of statism in
cultural, psychological, and philosophical dimensions. But unlike the
19th century individualists, Sciabarra argues that
dialectics pose a substantial challenge to libertarian
anarchism. In Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, he
sympathetically interprets Rand’s polemical defense of minarchism as
a dialectical effort to transcend a false dualism between statism and
anarchism (1995a, 278-283). In Total Freedom he devotes four
chapters to a charitable but systematic critique of Rothbard’s
anarcho-capitalism, and the underlying conception of liberty as
“universally applicable, regardless of the context within which
it is embedded or applied” (2000, 218). Sciabarra argues that,
at crucial junctures, Rothbard idealizes the market and the State
into dualistic, opposed spheres, related only through “the
external, mutually antagonistic relationship between voluntarism and
coercion” (2000, 355). This dualism leads Rothbard to romanticize
market processes, proposing “the monistic, utopian resolution of
anarcho-capitalism, in which the state’s functions were fully
absorbed by the market” (360). Thus Rothbard limits libertarianism
to a narrow focus on structural and political questions, and exhibits
a “lack of attention to the vast context within which [libertarian
principles] might exist, evolve, and thrive” (355).[38]

Whether or not Rothbard himself is actually
guilty of the “unanchored utopianism” Sciabarra attributes to him
(2000, 202), Sciabarra’s criticism identifies real strands of thought
within the individualist anarchist tradition.[39]
But in light of the discussion of Equality above, it seems that
minarchists are actually far more prone to synoptic delusions and
narrowly political reform than anarchists: the mystique of State
authority depends on a picture of the State as an external constraint
on civil society, whereas egalitarian anarchism highlights
the fact that freedom is a matter of concrete relations within
society. In any case, the best response to Sciabarra’s challenge is
to exhibit a dialectical anarchism, which connects anarchism
with a systematic understanding and critique of the dynamics of
social power, both inside and outside of the State apparatus. To aid
in doing so, I’d like to set out some of the different possible
relationships between libertarianism and “thicker” bundles of
socio-cultural commitments, which would recommend integrating the
two:

Entailment thickness: the commitments might just be
applications of libertarian principle to some special case, following from
non-aggression simply in light of non-contradiction.[40]

Application thickness: it might be that you could reject
commitments without formally contradicting the non-aggression
principle, but not without in fact interfering with its proper
application. Principles beyond libertarianism alone may be necessary
for determining where my rights end and yours begin, or stripping away
conceptual blinders that prevent certain violations of liberty from being
recognized as such.

Strategic thickness: certain ideas, practices, or
projects may be causal preconditions for a flourishing free society,
giving libertarians strategic reasons to endorse them. Although rejecting them
would be logically compatible with libertarianism, it might make it
harder for libertarian ideas to get much purchase, or might lead a free society
towards poverty, statism or civil war.

Grounds thickness: some commitments might be
consistent with the non-aggression principle, but might undermine or
contradict the deeper reasons that justify libertarian
principles. Although you could consistently accept libertarianism
without the bundle, you could not do so reasonably: rejecting the
bundle means rejecting the grounds for libertarianism.

Conjunction thickness: commitments might be worth
adopting for their own sakes, independent of libertarian
considerations. All that is asserted is that you ought to be a libertarian (for
whatever reason), and, as it happens, you also ought to accept some
further commitments (for independent reasons).

The two extreme cases, entailment thickness and conjunction thickness, can
largely be set aside, since the “relationship” between libertarianism and the
further commitment is either so tight (identity) or so loose (mere conjunction)
as to make the point vacuous. But the three intermediate cases of application
thickness, strategic thickness, and grounds thickness make deeper connections
between libertarianism and a rich set of further commitments that naturally
complement libertarianism.

Consider the conceptual and strategic reasons that libertarians have to
oppose authoritarianism, not only as enforced by governments but also
as expressed in culture, business, the family, and civil society. If
libertarianism is rooted in the principle of equality of authority,
then there are good reasons to think that not only political structures of
coercion, but also the whole system of status and unequal authority
deserves libertarian criticism. And it is important to realize that that system
includes not only exercises of coercive power, but also a knot of ideas,
practices, and institutions based on deference to traditionally constituted
authorities. In the political realm, these patterns of deference show up most
clearly in the honorary titles, submissive etiquette, and unquestioning
obedience extended to heads of state, judges, police, and other visible
representatives of government “law and order.” Although these rituals and habits
of obedience exist against the backdrop of statist coercion and intimidation,
they are also often practiced voluntarily. Similar expectations of deference
show up, to greater or lesser degrees, in cultural attitudes towards bosses in
the workplace, and parents in the family. Submission to traditionally
constituted authorities is reinforced not only through violence and threats, but
also through art, humor, sermons, historiography, journalism, childrearing, etc.
Although political coercion is the most distinctive expression of inequality of
authority, you could—in principle—have an authoritarian
social order without the exercise of coercion. Even in an anarchist society,
everyone might voluntarily agree to bow and scrape when speaking before the
(mutually agreed-on) town Chief. So long as the expectation of deference was
backed up only by means of verbal harangues, social ostracism of “unruly”
dissenters, culturally glorifying the authorities, etc., it would violate
no-one’s individual liberty and could not justifiably be resisted with
force.

But while there’s nothing logically inconsistent about envisioning
these sorts of societies, it is certainly weird. If the underlying
reason for committing to libertarian politics is rooted in the equality of
political authority, then even strictly voluntary expressions of inequality are
hard to reasonably reconcile with libertarianism. Yes, the meek could
voluntarily agree to bow and scrape, and the proud could angrily but
nonviolently demand obsequious forms of address and immediate obedience to their
fiat. But why should they? Libertarian equality delegitimizes the
notion of a natural right to rule or dominate other people’s affairs; the vision
of human beings as rational, independent agents of their own destiny renders
deference and unquestioning obedience ridiculous at best, and probably dangerous
to liberty in the long run. While no-one should be forced to treat her
fellows with the respect due to equals, or cultivate independent self-reliance
and contempt for the arrogance of power, libertarians certainly can—and
should—criticize those who do not, and exhort our
fellows not to rely on authoritarian social institutions, for reasons of both
grounds and strategic thickness.

General commitments to anti-authoritarianism, if applied to specific forms of
social power, have far-reaching implications for the relationship between
libertarianism and anti-racism, gay liberation, and other movements for social
transformation. I have written elsewhere on the strategic and conceptual
importance of radical feminist insights to libertarianism, and vice
versa.[41] The causal and conceptual interconnections
between patriarchal authority, the cult of violent masculinity, and the
militaristic State have been discussed by radical feminists such as Andrea
Dworkin and Robin Morgan, as well as radical libertarians such as Herbert
Spencer and, more recently, Carol Moore.[42] Moreover, the
insights of feminists such as Susan Brownmiller into the pervasiveness of rape,
battery, and other forms of male violence against women, present both a crisis
and an opportunity for the application of libertarian principles.

Libertarianism professes to be a comprehensive theory of human freedom; what
supposedly distinguishes the libertarian theory of justice is that we concern
ourselves with violent coercion no matter who is practicing it. But
what feminists have forced into the public eye in the last 30 years is that we
live in a society where one out of every four women faces rape or battery by an
intimate partner,[43] and where women are threatened or attacked
by men who profess to love them, because the men coercing them believe they have
a right to control “their” women. Male violence against women is nominally
illegal but nevertheless systematic, motivated by the desire for control,
culturally excused, and hideously ordinary. For libertarians, this should sound
eerily familiar; confronting the reality of male violence means nothing less
than recognizing the existence of a violent political order working alongside,
and independently of, the violent political order of statism.[44]
Male supremacy has its own ideological rationalizations, its own propaganda, its
own expropriation, and its own violent enforcement; although often in league
with the male-dominated State, male violence is older, more invasive, closer to
home, and harder to escape than most forms of statism. To seriously oppose all
political violence, libertarians need to fight, at least, a two-front war,
against both statism and male supremacy. It is, then, important to note how the
ideological dichotomy between “personal” and “political” problems, so often
criticized by feminists,[45] has tended to blank out systemic male
violence from libertarian analysis. And also how the writings of some
libertarians on the family—especially those identified with the
“paleolibertarian” political-cultural project—have amounted to little more
than outright denial of male violence. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, for example, goes so
far as to indulge in the conservative fantasy that the traditional “internal
layers and ranks of authority” in the family are actually bulwarks of
“resistance vis-a-vis the state” (Hoppe 2001 § IV). Those “ranks of authority”
in the family mean the pater familias; but whether
father-right is, at a given historical moment, in league with or at odds with
State prerogatives, the fact that it is so widely enforced by the threat or
practice of male violence makes enlisting it in the struggle against statism
look much like enlisting Stalin to fight Hitler—no matter who wins, we all
lose.

Considerations of grounds and strategy also
suggest important connections between anarchism and the virtue of
voluntary mutual aid between workers, in the form of
community organizations, charitable projects, and labor unions. Once
again, the underlying reasons for valuing Liberty also give
good reasons for committing to voluntary solidarity with
your fellow people. One could in principle believe that everyone
ought to be free to pursue her own ends while also holding
that nobody’s ends actually matter except her own.[46]
But again, while the position is possible, it is weird; one
of the best reasons for being concerned about the freedom of others
to pursue their own ends is a certain generalized respect for the
importance of other people’s lives and the integrity of their
choices, which is intimately connected with the libertarian
conception of Equality. That says nothing in favor of forcing
you to participate in welfare schemes,[47]
or robbing Peter to pay Paul; but it does say something for working
with your neighbors in voluntary cooperative efforts to
improve your own lives or the lives of others. It’s likely also that
networks of voluntary aid organizations would be strategically
important to individual flourishing in a free society, in which there
would be no expropriative welfare bureaucracy for people living with
poverty or precarity to fall back on. Projects reviving the
bottom-up, solidaritarian spirit of the independent unions and mutual
aid societies that flourished in the late 19th and early
20th centuries, before the rise of the welfare
bureaucracy, may be essential for a flourishing free society, and one
of the primary means by which workers could take control of their own
lives, without depending on either bosses or bureaucrats.[48]

If 20th century libertarians have
mostly failed to emphasize the potential for cooperative mutual aid,
the failure can be traced to two related confusions, born of
undialectical analysis and the failure to integrate Liberty with
Solidarity. The first conflates the principles of mutual aid with
government coercion in the name of “social welfare”—most
dramatically in the visceral hostility most 20th century
libertarians expressed towards labor unionism. Libertarian critics
have often condemned unions as “bands of thugs,”[49]
the government-privileged foot soldiers of a stagnant,
interventionist political economy. Currently existing labor unions do
use coercive means to organize—in the United States, employers are
forced to enter into collective bargaining with unions that gain
National Labor Relations Board recognition, and non-violent means of
opposing unionization drives, such as retaliatory firing, are legally
prohibited. The official, government-privileged union establishment
also has for decades sought more government planning and
economic intervention. But treating the existing union establishment
as representative of the essential features of organized labor
disregards the historical process by which unions were co-opted,
captured, and domesticated by the expanding State bureaucracy during
the 1920s-1950s. The process was achieved with the collaboration of
one conservative faction within the labor movement,
represented most visibly by the “business unionism” of the AFL,
which gained leverage over its many competitors and seats in the
back-rooms of power through the new system of patronage.[50]
It would be hard to discover from the writings of anti-union
libertarians that labor unions existed before the Wagner Act of 1935,
or that around the turn of the century one of the most vibrant wings
of organized labor were the radical, anarchist-led unions, most
famously the I.W.W., which rejected all attempts to influence or
capture State power.[51]
They argued that putting economic power into the government’s hands
deprived workers of control over their own fate, and wasted
unions’ resources on bureaucracy and partisan maneuvering. Although
they worked for incremental improvements in wages and conditions,
they ultimately hoped to win not reforms of the existing capitalist
system, but workers’ ownership of the “means of production”—the
land, factories, and tools they labored with—not through the
political means of expropriation (as the Marxists suggested), but
through the economic means of free association, agitation, direct
action, voluntary strikes, union solidarity, and mutual aid between
workers, which would “build a new society within the shell of the
old.” The emerging new society, far from the central planning
boards of state socialism, would be a world of independent
contractors and worker-owned co-ops, organized from the bottom up by
the workers themselves.

It was only through the political collaboration
of the establishmentarian union bosses and the “Progressive”
business class—in the form of violent persecution of the radicals,
such as the Palmer raids, and government patronage to establishment
unions through the NLRB—that the centralized, statist unionism of
the AFL-CIO rose to dominance within the labor movement.[52]
Union methods are legally regulated and union demands effectively
constrained to modest (and easily revoked) improvements in wages and
conditions—with issues such as workers’ voice in the workplace, let
alone control of the means of production, dropped entirely. The only
real power remaining to effect more substantial changes comes through
their power as organized blocs for lobbying and electioneering. If
unionism is today mostly statist, then it is because unions are
largely what the State has made them, through the usual carrots and
sticks of government interventionism.

General Motors has benefited at least as
much from government patronage as the UAW, yet libertarian criticism
of the magnates of state capitalism is hardly extended to business as
such in the way that criticism of existing unions is routinely
extended to any form of organized labor. The difference in treatment
is no doubt closely connected with the emphasis many 20th
century libertarians placed on defending capitalism against the
attacks of state socialists. While they were right to see that
existing modes of production should not be further distorted
by even greater government regimentation, this insight was often
perverted into the delusion that existing modes of production would
be the natural outcome of an undistorted market. The
confusion has been encouraged by systematic ambiguity in the term
“capitalism,” which has been used to name at least three
different economic systems:

The free market: any economic order that emerges from
voluntary exchanges of property and labor, free of government intervention and
other forms of systemic coercion.

Alienation of labor: a specific form of labor market, in
which the dominant economic activity is production in workplaces strictly
divided by class, where most workers work for a boss, in return for a
wage, surviving by renting out their labor to someone else. The shop, and the
tools and facilities that make it run, are owned by the boss or by absentee
owners to whom the boss reports, not by the workers themselves.

Since government intervention always ends with the barrel of a gun, free
market “capitalism” and corporate state “capitalism” cannot coexist at the same
time and in the same respect. “Capitalism” in the third sense—the
alienation of labor—is a category independent of “capitalism” in
either of the first two senses. There are many ways that a labor market might
turn out; it could be organized into traditional employer-employee
relationships, worker co-ops, community workers’ councils, or a diffuse network
of shopkeeps and independent contractors. Unflinching free marketeers might
advocate any of these, or might be indifferent as to which prevails;
interventionist statists might also favor traditional employer-employee
relationships (as under fascism) or any number of different arrangements (as
under state communism). Once these three senses are disentangled, it is
important to see how 20th century libertarian defenses of
“capitalism” against interventionist critique have fallen into a second
conflation, between economic defenses of (1) the free market, and (2, 3) the way
that big business operates in the unfree market that actually exists today. This
confused approach, aptly dubbed “vulgar libertarianism” by Kevin Carson,[53]
obscures the ways in which actually existing businesses benefit from pervasive
government intervention, and blinds “capitalist” libertarians to the affinity
between anti-statist models of labor organizing and libertarian defenses of free
markets.

Disentangling free market economics from the particular market structure of
alienated labor reveals some good reasons to think that there are serious
economic problems with bureaucratic, centralized corporate commerce
that rose to dominance in the 19th and 20th centuries under the
auspices of “Nationalist” and “Progressive” interventionism.[54]
Central planners face the knowledge problems identified by Mises, Hayek, and
Rothbard whether those planners are government or corporate bureaucrats.[55] If
workers are often deeply unhappy with the regimented, authoritarian structure of
corporate workplaces, then there is also reason to believe that many would
happily dump the bosses off their backs in favor of more autonomous forms of
work, as those become widespread, successful, and economically reliable. Thus
there is reason to think that in a free market less hierarchical, less
centralized, more worker-focused forms of production would multiply and
bureaucratic big business would wither under the pressure of
competition.[56] Since the cooperative, bottom-up model of
labor unionism offers one of the best existing models for practically asserting
workers’ self-interest, and ultimately replacing boss-centric industry with
decentralized, worker-centric production, there are good reasons for
libertarians to integrate wildcat unionism into their understanding of social
power.

Solidaritarian considerations may also shed some light on the standing debate
amongst libertarians over secession and constitutional centralism. Liberty in
the abstract demands a universal right of secession; to keep any one
person or any group of people under a government that they wish to exit requires
you to violate their individual liberty in at least one of the three ways
challenged above. But voluntarily organized protection agencies, arbiters, etc.
could still claim wide or narrow jurisdictions, and could organize their
administrative and juridical functions into rigid hierarchies or take a more
“horizontal,” decentralized approach. Affirming a right of secession
does not answer the constitutional question of which free arrangement
libertarians ought to prefer. But the same solidaritarian considerations that
tell against centralization and hierarchy in making widgets should tell even
more strongly against centralization and hierarchy in political power. The
pretensions of the powerful threaten a free society when it is hard to defend
yourself physically against abuses of the power entrusted to defense
associations, or intellectually against the allure of State mysticism. And there
are good prima facie reasons to suppose that people will be better able
to resist both threats by devolving power from centralized seats of power down
to the local level, with arbitration and enforcement handled face-to-face
through diffuse networks of local associations, rather than mediated through
powerful, bureaucratized hegemons.

Centralists may object that the historical record is more complex, and less
favorable to decentralism, than prima facie considerations would suggest.
While a centralized political power has more resources and a wider scope to
enforce coercive demands, local powers are often more subject to parochial
prejudices, and can often enforce them with force that is less diffuse, closer
to home, and therefore more intense than anything a mighty but remote central
government could muster. American history seems to illustrate this point
dramatically with the case of the Confederacy, in which the opponents of federal
power urged secession in order to strengthen and perpetuate the absolute tyranny
of chattel slavery.[57] But what is needed here is a more
radical decentralism, dissociated from the humbug of “states’ rights.”
Decentralist libertarians are perfectly justified in supporting the
white Southerners’ right to secede, and condemning the bayonet-point Unionism of
the Civil War—provided that they also support black slaves’
rights to secede from the Southern states, and condemn the bayonet-point
paternalism of the Southern slave-lords.
The approach here is to condemn the
federal war against secession, while also supporting the efforts of black
Southerners to free themselves, through escape or open rebellion.[58]
The problem with the Confederacy was not the defiance of federal
authority, but the elevation of state authority over the objections of
poor whites and black slaves: too much, not too little, centralized power.
Nothing other than pure mysticism limits secession to states or provinces:
provincial governments enjoy no more sovereign authority over their citizens
than the federal government does, and the same principles that justify the
withdrawal of states from the federal union also justify counties or cities
withdrawing from state governments, and neighborhoods or individual
citizens withdrawing from local governments, or from any government
anywhere.

Liberty, understood in the context of Equality and Solidarity, calls for
political revolution against all forms of government, no matter how “limited,”
and overweening centralization of power even in non-coercive institutions. But
“revolution” itself takes on a different character when the obscuring haze of
State mysticism has been dispelled. If “revolution” means the process of
dissolving the legal authority of a government, then revolution is quite easy to
achieve. You have no obligation to obey any government longer than you choose to
remain under it; once you have declared your intent to withdraw from the State,
no government on earth has the authority to force you to recognize its authority
over you—let alone to force you to pay taxes or regiment your behavior. If
a government’s orders invade your rights—and all governments’ orders
eventually do—then you have every right to withdraw from, ignore, defy, or
resist it however seems best to you. Earlier, I stated that this essay’s purpose
was political revolution; then I stated that it was merely to convince you to
become an anarchist. But it should now be clear that I was not moving the
goalposts. If you become an anarchist, then you have already completed
the revolution: no government on earth has any legitimate authority to
bind you to any obligation that you did not already have on your own. It’s a
mistake to think of the State as holding you under its authority while you
struggle to escape; at the most, it has power, not authority
over you. As far as your former government is concerned, you have the moral
standing not of a subject, but of the head of a revolutionary state of one.

Of course, that leaves the question of how best to defend your
revolutionary state from counter-revolutionary invasion. Declaring yourself
independent really is enough to release you from any obligation to your former
government—but try telling that to the judge. Still, the first task is
to recognize your situation for what it is. Minarchism, by leaving the myth of
legal authority unchallenged, concedes moral dignity to the statists that they
have not earned. The point is to challenge not only the abuses of
government authority, but the normal uses of that authority—to see the
taxmen, policemen, hangmen, and Congressmen who invade your liberties not as
unruly representatives of a State with authority over you, but a sanctimonious
gang of robbers, swindlers, and usurpers bringing war upon you. Once
you have recognized that, you can begin to think intelligently about the best
cultural and material arrangements for defending against them. I have already
discussed a few of the particulars above; the rest is another discussion for
another essay.[59]

Charles Johnson (2008)

If you enjoyed this essay, why not pick up a nicely-printed physical copy of it for yourself? Or to pass around town?

Long, Roderick T. (2007). “Market Anarchism As Constitutionalism,”
In Anarchism/Minarchism: Is Government Part of a Free Country?,
ed. Roderick T. Long and Tibor R. Machan. Aldershot: Ashgate. 133–154.

[1] For
the purposes of this essay, I will mostly be using the term
“anarchism” as shorthand for “individualist anarchism;”
since the defense of anarchism I will offer rests on individualist
principles, it will not provide a cogent basis for communist,
primitivist, or other non-individualist forms of anarchism. And I
will use the term “individualist anarchism” in a broad sense, to
describe any position that (1) denies the legitimacy of any form of
(monopoly) government authority, (2) on individualist ethical
grounds. As I will use it, the term picks out a family of similar
doctrines, not a particular self-description or historical
tradition. Thus it includes, but is not limited to, the specific
19th and early 20th century socialist movement
known as “individualist anarchism,” whose members included
Benjamin Tucker, Victor Yarros, and Voltairine de Cleyre. It also
includes the views of 20th and 21st
century“anarcho-capitalists” such as Murray Rothbard and David
Friedman; contemporary self-described “individualist anarchists”
and “mutualists” such as Wendy McElroy, Joe Peacott, and Kevin
Carson; and of others, such as Gustave de Molinari, Lysander
Spooner, or Robert LeFevre, who rejected the State on individualist
grounds but declined (for whatever reasons) to refer to themselves
as “anarchists.” Many self-described “socialist” anarchists
deny that “anarcho-capitalism” should be counted as a form of
anarchism at all, or associated with individualist anarchism in
particular; many self-described “anarcho-capitalists” deny that
“socialist” anarchism should be counted as a form of genuine
individualism, or genuine anarchism. With all due respect to my
comrades on the Left and on the Right, I will use the term in an
ecumenical sense, for reasons of style, and also because the
relationship between anarchism, “capitalism,” and “socialism”
is one of the substantive issues to be discussed in the course of
this essay.

[3] “Libertarianism”
as discussed in this essay is a theory of political justice, not a
position on the Nolan Chart. “Small government” types who speak
kindly of economic freedom or civil liberties may or may not qualify
as “libertarians” for the purpose of my discussion. Those who
treat liberty as one political good that must be balanced against
other goods such as social stability, economic prosperity,
democratic rule, or socioeconomic equality, and should sometimes be
sacrificed for their sake, are unlikely to count. Since they are not
committed to the ideal of liberty as a principled constraint on all
political power, they are no more likely to be directly convinced by
my arguments than progressives, traditionalists, communists, etc.

[4] Of
course, the male Left of the day actually demanded fraternité,
“brotherhood.” I’ll speak of “solidarity” instead of
“brotherhood” for the obvious anti-sexist reasons, and also for
its association with the history of the labor movement. There are
few causes in America that most 20th century libertarians
were less sympathetic to than organized labor, but I have chosen to
speak of “the value of solidarity,” in spite of all that, for
the same reasons that Ayn Rand chose to speak of “the virtue of
selfishness:” in order to prove a point. The common criticisms of
organized labor from the 20th century libertarian
movement, and the relationship between liberty and organized labor,
are one of the topics I will discuss below.

[5] Thus
the libertarian emphasis on both personal freedom and private
property rights. One way to treat someone as if she were your slave
is to force her to serve your ends rather than her own: by forcing
her to apply her own labor and property to some end that she would
not have freely agreed to support, or by forcing her to withhold her
own labor and property from some end that she would have freely
agreed to support. Another way to treat someone as if she were your
slave is to force her to labor for your profit. Even if you do not
force her to work on one job rather than another, you are still
effectively enslaving her by taking the fruits of her labor for your
own purposes.

[6] Thus
Jefferson 1776a: “… That to secure these rights, Governments are
instituted among Men [sic], deriving their just powers from
the consent of the governed” (¶ 2).

[7] It
should be clear that this is a necessary but not a sufficient
condition for counting as the government of a given State. Anybody
might claim the right to issue enforceable legal orders, but only
some of the claimants are part of the government. (I gather that
there are still Bourbon pretenders who claim the right to
rule France; but whatever their aspirations, they are not currently
the government of France.) But for any institution to count as the
government, it must at least make the claim, or act in a way that
manifests the claim: an institution that did not even claim the
right to make enforceable legal orders might very well issue
political position papers; it might give advice on how to live; but
it would not be making laws.

[8] This
is a deliberate revision to the Weberian conception of the State as
a monopoly on the use of legally accepted force. While most modern
governments claim such sweeping authority over enforcement, it is
sheer anachronism to try to build a claim of territorial monopoly
into the definition of the State. Historically many
constitutions have taken it for granted that certain forms of force
(e.g. by parents against children, by husbands against wives, by
masters against slaves) are simply outside of the purview of the
law. It’s true that under most States throughout history, parents
have been able to beat their children without legal repercussions.
But it would be a serious mistake to infer from this that the
government (as sole arbiter of legal enforcement in the territory
within which the family lives) has authorized or deputized
parents to beat their children. Rather, the enforceable authority of
parents over children was thought simply to be a “private”
matter, beyond the “public” realm of questions that the State
claims to address. The enforceability of parental authority is quite
arguably treated as a political given that the State recognizes,
more akin to one State’s recognition of the sovereignty of
other States than to the State’s authorization of the use
of force by deputies, posses, or militias. Some implications of this
idea are teased out below in the discussion of “application
thickness.”

[9] By
using “legitimate” as a modifier on “authority,” I’ve
illustrated an important point, but also run a serious risk. If I
speak of “legitimate authority,” that might seem to suggest that
I’m not distinguishing authority from mere power,
but rather distinguishing two different kinds of authority—the
legitimate kind and the illegitimate kind. Then it would seem that
the issue between minarchists and anarchists is not whether
governments have the authority they claim, but rather whether the
authority they have is legitimate authority or illegitimate
authority. But this is a serious mistake, which I think leads to
other mistakes. For now, it will be enough to note that, as I am
using the terms “legitimacy” and “authority,” all genuine
authority is legitimate authority. “Illegitimate
authority” is not a special kind of authority which is
illegitimate, any more than “counterfeit money” is a special
kind of money which is counterfeit. Illegitimate authority is,
rather, mere power, fraudulently portrayed as rightful authority.

[10] Suppose,
for example, that Norton is an avid birder, and Twain cannot tell a
jackdaw from a magpie. Then when Norton points out a bird and says,
“That is a jackdaw,” Twain ought to consider it a jackdaw,
because Norton said so—even if Twain has no other reason
for considering it a jackdaw besides Norton’s say-so. Why? Because
Norton said so, and Norton knows something about jackdaws whereas
Twain knows nothing about them, so Twain ought to defer to Norton’s
judgment.

[11] Similarly,
it is not enough for a minarchist to show that if you organize
government officials into such-and-such a constitutional order, the
institution you’ve organized will systematically tend towards making
correct rulings on matters of legal right. While the source of the
ruling may justify a (defeasible) presumption that it can
legitimately be enforced, the way that it justifies has
nothing to do with government authority.

[12] Taken
severally, each challenge poses a problem for one of forms
of special authority that minarchists have traditionally wanted
governments to exercise. I think the import of each individual
challenge is actually less than anarchists have
historically thought: minarchists could respond to any individual
challenge by revising their theory, and promoting an even more
minimalist government that abdicates the function that each
challenge called into question. But taken together, the
three challenges jointly whittle a “properly limited government”
down to no government at all: any institution that minarchists could
make consistent with liberty, in light of all three
challenges, would have abandoned all claims of sovereign authority,
and thus abdicated the throne.

[17] It could go
on calling itself a “government,” of course—just as Emperor Norton went on
calling himself Emperor of North America even though he had no subjects except
those who voluntarily played along with his game. But it would no longer be a
“government” in any sense that’s incompatible with individualist anarchism.
(Specifically, whatever it fancied itself, it would no longer be claiming the
sovereign authority of the State; see the section on Equality below.)

[18] Classical
liberals and minarchist libertarians have sometimes tried to
sidestep anarchist objections by appealing to the consent of the
governed. Even if government sovereignty entails limitations on
private citizens’ freedom to defend themselves directly, not all
limitations on liberty violate libertarian principles: free people
can bind themselves to new obligations by agreeing to contracts.
Liberal theorists draw up the analogy of a “social contract,”
and claim that private citizens can be bound to recognize the
government’s sovereignty by explicit, or tacit, or hypothetical
consent to the terms of the political system. This sort of reply
could be made to any of the three challenges that I pose, and so
deserves a response. Unfortunately, constraints of space prevent me
from giving an adequate response. Fortunately, excellent systematic
critiques of the claim already exist in Spooner 1867-1870 and the
first chapter of Barnett 2004. In any case minarchists should be
very hesitant to draw on appeals to tacit consent: exactly the same
argument could just as easily be used to justify all forms of
taxation (on the theory that citizens consented to pay for
government expenses when they consented to the contract), many forms
of invasive laws (on the theory that citizens consented to abide by
the government’s standards of conduct or hygiene), etc. Most serious
defenders of minarchism in the 20th century have seen
this difficulty and have tried to develop theories which provide for
the legitimacy of government without the need for unanimous consent,
whether tacit or explicit.

[20]Nozick,
unlike some who advance the procedural argument, takes this point in
stride: his argument is not that the government enjoys a specialright over and above what private citizens enjoy, but rather that a
locally dominant defense association, in the course of carrying out its daily
business, will be put in the special position of either permitting or
forbidding any efforts at private enforcement within its sphere of influence,
due to its special position as the local hegemon. Nozick argues that this gives
the agency a de facto monopoly on the authorization
of force, without the exercise of special prerogatives and without treading on
the liberty of the defense associations and private citizens constrained by the
procedural protections. If this argument worked, then Nozick would have
established a legitimate path for a locally dominant defense agency to assert
sovereignty, without treading on the liberty of others. He also would have made
the argument in precisely the way that I suggested a minarchist would need to:
his argument would have demonstrated the connection between sovereignty and the
special position of the government within society—specifically the special
position conferred by being the sole dominant protective agency in a given
locality. But as I shall argue presently, Nozick’s transition from procedural
protection to ex ante procedural “oversight” will not bear scrutiny.

[21] A
defense association (A) may very well be entitled to suppress a
would-be enforcer (B) who refuses to disclose the
procedures that she used to determine guilt. If A cannot discover
whether a procedure is reliable or completely arbitrary, then they
may be entitled to treat the claim as arbitrary pending further
investigation. But it is up to A to do the leg-work of finding out
what B’s procedures are before they declare that they cannot
discover them. A can try to find out about B’s procedures by
directly asking B, or by sending someone to sit in on B’s
proceedings, or by asking former participants in B’s proceedings, or
by finding out whether B has informed anyone else of her procedures,
or in any number of other ways. A cannot simply sit back
and demand that B submit to “oversight” as defined by A, or
suppress B simply for failing to fill out the right forms. If A
fails to make serious efforts at discovery, then it is they,
not B, who are guilty of arbitrary and unreliable
enforcement procedures.

[22] Suppose
I announce, “I will stop anyone who tries to stab me with a knife.
But I will not stop anyone who is only using a knife to slice a loaf
of bread.” Have I claimed the right to oversee the use of
knives? Have I permitted you to slice bread with a knife?

[23] Although
this reply would indeed preserve a form of sovereignty against the
Childs challenge, it is worth noting how radical a reduction in the
size and scope of the “minimal State” is required to meet the
challenge. A government that maintained only a monopoly on
legislating and adjudicating rights, but left
enforcing them up to private efforts, would be a very
limited government indeed; it might very well have no police, no
executive bureaucracy, no intelligence agencies, no border guards,
and no armies. The microscopic State that resulted would be far more
limited than Rand’s “limited government,” even more minimal than
Nozick’s “ultraminimal state.” Sovereignty would be asserted by
a properly limited government only insofar as general laws and
rulings on specific legal disputes would be made under the authority
of a single government. The microscopic State would have no
authority to override or exclude private citizens from just efforts
to protect their own rights, or the rights of others; its
sovereignty would rest in its authority to act as a “final
standard” on the definition and application of rights. In fact the
closest historical analogue would be the constitution of medieval
Iceland—a society most often discussed in libertarian
literature for illustrations of what a functioning anarchy
might look like. The Icelandic Free State was not an
anarchy: there was a sovereign legislature (the
Althing),
which also served as a court of final appeal; but it remains
interesting to anarchists because the legal order in Iceland
functioned with no central executive. (For a detailed discussion of
the constitution of medieval Iceland, see Byock 2001.
Long 2002a
sets out the both the continuities and departures from anarchist
principles in the constitution of the Free State, and explains the
eventual collapse of the Free State as the growth of the microscopic
germs of government into bases of power for warlordism and civil
war.)

[24] See also
Spooner’s “Letter to Thomas F. Bayard”
(1882a) and “Natural Law; or, the Science
of Justice” (1882b) for close variations on the same challenge. Childs
himself also anticipates something like this line of argument, and makes
arguments that Rand’s epistemological and ethical positions demand a similar
conclusion. I’ve picked out Spooner’s version of the challenge in the letter to
Cleveland because it provides the most systematic exposition of the point.

[25] If
the government passed a resolution stating that the square of the
hypotenuse in a right triangle is always equal to the square of the
other two sides, then the resolution would say something true,
and something that everyone is obliged to believe. But it would
hardly justify the claim that we need a properly geometrical
government to serve as the “final arbiter” of the properties of
right triangles.

[26]Spooner 1882b argues that the principles of
justice are “usually a very plain and simple matter, easily understood by common
minds” (Section IV ¶ 1), and that “Men [sic] living
in contact with each other, and having intercourse together, cannot
avoid learning natural law, to a very great extent” (Section IV ¶ 2). If
so, then the “commands” of natural justice could all be understood as
conclusions of arguments, without the need to appeal to the authority of
experts. While I think that this is true of most if not all cases, nothing turns
on it for the purposes of the challenge to legislative authority. If there are
cases where understanding or applying the principles of justice requires
expertise, then all those hard cases should be turned over to some expert for
judgment. But it would be fallacious to infer from that that there must be some
expert to whom all hard cases are turned over. In any case, the basis for the
authority of the judgment would be acknowledged wisdom and judgment, not
personal political position.

[28] That does
not mean that Twain can later renege and ignore Norton’s decision, if
he consented to let Norton decide the case. It does mean that Twain can
later decline to let Norton decide any more cases for him. See note 10 on the
failure of historical liberal theories to meet the criteria for genuine consent,
including those that rely on claims of “tacit consent.”

[29] Perhaps
under dire enough circumstances – if, for example, the dispute is not only
unresolved but careening towards a violent feud – the parties to the dispute
could rightfully be forced to the bargaining table by an impartial third party.
I am not confident that this is true, but I am not confident that it is false,
either. What I am confident of is that, if third parties ever have the
right to force arbitration, then the right is possessed by everyone,
and has nothing to do with the special prerogatives of a government to
arbitrate. For the government to claim an exclusive or
superior authority to intervene within an arbitrarily asserted
jurisdiction might not usurp the natural liberty of the disputants. But if it
did not, then it would usurp the natural liberty of other potential
arbiters, who would have just as much of a right to intervene as the self-styled
“government.”

[30] I
do, actually, think that the relationship between libertarianism and
these forms of egalitarianism is more complex than many 20th
century libertarians have suggested; but that’s an issue for later
discussion.

[31] Jefferson
makes this point even more explicitly, if less elegantly, in his
original draft of the Declaration, where the same passage reads: “We
hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable: that all men are
created equal and independent; that from that equal creation
they derive rights inherent and inalienable, among which are the
preservation of life, and liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”
(1776b ¶ 2, emphasis added).

[32] The
original conception of Equality from the revolutionary Left
appreciates human plurality and supports an uncompromising
individualism in politics—not the anonymizing mass
politics of the statist Left, in both its “progressive” and
“radical” incarnations. Nozick expresses the point admirably:
“Side constraints express the inviolability of other persons. But
why may not one violate persons for the greater social good? ….
But there is no social entity with a good that undergoes
some sacrifice for its own good. There are only individual people,
different individual people, with their own individual lives. Using
one of these people for the benefit of others, uses him [sic]
and benefits the others. Nothing more. What happens is that
something is done to him for the sake of others. Talk of an overall
social good covers this up. (Intentionally?) To use a person in this
way does not sufficiently respect and take account of the fact that
he is a separate person, that his is the only life he has. He
does not get some overbalancing good from his sacrifice, and no one
is entitled to force this upon him—least of all a state or
government” (1974, 32-33).

[33] The
point here is not that deliberation about consequences is completely
irrelevant to questions of justice. Like Roderick Long (2002b), I
hold that, while deliberation about consequences cannot trump
deliberation about rights, our understanding of the content
of rights can be revised in light of consequences. (Thus, for
example, consequentialist considerations can be important to
determining the proper judgment in a case of reducing the natural
law.) But if our judgments about the requirements of justice can be
revised in light of reflection on the consequences, the revision can
(indeed must) go the other way, too. What counts as a “good
consequence” also partly depends on what justice demands; in
particular, if bringing about a situation S involves you in
initiating force against an innocent person, then S is not
a good consequence: being unjust is a defeater for an end counting
as something worth pursuing. It is in this sense that rights act as
“side constraints” (Nozick 1974, 28-33) on
moral deliberation.

[34] Government
edicts have no more magical power to enforce themselves than decisions by
anarchistic arbitrators. If someone is unhappy with the way a case was decided
on final appeal, she can lobby Congress to change the law, or try to convince
the President to appoint more congenial justices, or simply defy the ruling and
try to find followers to stage a coup or a revolution…. See also Long 2006, which connects the mystical political
conception behind the minarchist quest for legal finality with the mystical
logical conception behind the metaphysical quest for a self-applying
rule, as exposed by Wittgenstein’s
writing on rule-following.

[35] See Tucker 1888 for an overview of the “four
monopolies” that he believed to be at the root of both statism and the
exploitation of labor: the land monopoly, the money monopoly, the tariff
monopoly, and the patent monopoly. Chapter Five of Carson 2004 offers an excellent systematic
overview of the views of Tucker and his fellow 19th century
individualists on the four monopolies.

[37] This
holistic picture of social power has been endangered and marginalized, but never
completely eradicated, from libertarian theory in the 20th century.
During the late 1960s and 1970s it was partially and fitfully revived by the
efforts of libertarians such as Murray Rothbard, Karl Hess, and Sam Konkin to
make common cause with anti-imperialist and anti-authoritarian elements in the
New Left. For the locus classicus of this approach in
the late 20th century libertarian movement, see Rothbard 1965.

[38]Sciabarra
is at pains to make clear that his critique does not aim at a
refutation of anarchism as such; his emphasis is
methodological, and for his critique “The essential issue is not
whether anarchism or minarchism is preferable—to some extent, the jury is
still out on many of the important questions raised by either side” (341). But
he suggests that dialectics call for substantial revision to existing defenses
of anarchism, stating in reply to a review that “I remain profoundly suspicious
of anarchism and the non-dialectical premises that seem to inspire it” (2002, 394).

[39] See Long 2001b for a detailed defense of Rothbard
against Sciabarra’s criticism. But if the anti-dialectical Rothbard did not
exist, Walter Block has invented him.

[40]
An Aztec libertarian might urge, “Of course
libertarianism has upshots for religious beliefs! It means you have
to give up human sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli.”

[43] See
Tjaden and Thoennes 2000 on the findings of the NIJ/CDC National
Violence Against Women Survey in 1995-1996. Statistics on violence
against women have been hotly contested, and some of these disputes
have been taken up by libertarian authors such as Wendy McElroy. But
most of the discussion has focused on the findings of a single
study, Mary Koss’s 1985 study of sexual assault amongst college
women (which found that one in four college-aged women had suffered
at least one act of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime). I think
the criticisms of Koss are largely unfounded, but in any case Tjaden
and Thoennes surveyed a broader sample, using more detailed
questions, and definitions substantially more conservative than
Koss; see pp. 3-12 for a discussion of the survey methodology.
Detailed explanation and defense of the NVAWS figures, and of
related feminist research into the prevalence and nature of gender
violence is, as they say, beyond the scope of this essay, but for an
excellent discussion of Koss’s findings that raises many salient
general points, see Warshaw 1994, which includes both an analysis of
the findings and a concluding methodological discussion by Koss.

[44] Thus
Susan Brownmiller writes that “Man’s discovery that his genitalia
could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the
most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use
of fire and the first crude stone axe. From prehistoric times to the
present, I believe, rape has played a critical function. It is
nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by
which all men keep all women in a state of fear”
(1975, 15). Libertarian critics often dismiss Brownmiller’s and
similar analyses on the grounds that not all men are rapists and not
all women are raped, but this badly misunderstands Brownmiller’s
point. Brownmiller is concerned with the systemic role of
rape, considered as a social fact that affects all men and all
women, whether or not the particular man commits rape or the
particular woman suffers it. The fact that rape is so prevalent—even
more prevalent than Brownmiller realized in 1975—and the
constraints that the threat of rape imposes on all women in
ordinary life systematically structures the social relationships
between men and women, as Brownmiller details throughout her book.
Similar remarks could be made about other pervasive forms of
violence against women, such as wife beating. The systemic violence
of male dominance ought to be recognizable to libertarians as a
politically coercive order, even though it is usually carried out in
“society,” independently of the State apparatus; as Catharine
MacKinnon writes, “Unlike the ways in which men systematically
enslave, violate, dehumanize, and exterminate other men, expressing
political inequalities among men, men’s forms of dominance over
women have been accomplished socially as well as economically, prior
to the operation of the law, without express state acts, often in
intimate contexts, as everyday life” (1989, 161).

[45] See
Hanisch 1969/1978 for the original formulation of the idea that “the
personal is political:” “So the reason I participate in these
meetings is not to solve any personal problem. One of the first
things we discover in these groups is that personal problems are
political problems. There are no personal solutions at this time.
There is only collective action for a collective solution.” It
must be stressed that for Hanisch and other radical feminists,
“collective action” and “political action” do not
necessarily entail State action. The point is to recognize
the conditions faced by individual women as expressions of an
overarching system of social power, rather than sweeping it under
the rug of the “private.” Cf. Johnson and Long 2005, §2.

[47] Quite the
contrary; respect for your fellow human beings entails that you must respect
each person’s perfect right to refuse or to withdraw her support, and
vice versa—and that anyone who tries to
force the unwilling to participate in their collective project is
nothing more than a sanctimonious highwayman.

[48] During
the late 19th and early 20th century, before
the rise of the modern welfare State, there was in fact a vast and
growing network of mutual aid societies in which low-income workers
pooled their resources to gain affordable healthcare, small-scale
credit, lifelong education, information about wages and conditions
in workplaces, worker-run hiring halls, labor bargaining, strike
relief, personal and cultural connections, old-age pensions, life
insurance, and many other important services which were later
co-opted and colonized by the emerging welfare bureaucracy.
Sometimes the independent, government-free societies withered due to
obsolescence; in other cases—particularly radical labor unions
such as the Industrial Workers of the World—they were destroyed by
violent government persecution. See Beito 2000 for an excellent
discussion in the context of the rise and fall of voluntary
“fraternal society” or “friendly society” lodges.
Reconnecting with this history would have direct strategic benefits
for libertarians, insofar as similar voluntary associations are
likely to be an important part of any healthy free market. Besides
those direct benefits, it may also be worth considering the
likelihood that mutual aid projects based on free association and
self-help could help divorce well-meaning Leftists from the mystique
of the welfare State. (Even if it does not cure their souls, it may
at least give them something less destructive to do with their time
and resources.)

[49] Most
recently by Walter Block (2006), in his working paper criticizing
“thick libertarianism,” whether allied with Left-wing or
Right-wing cultural politics.

[50] See
Buhle 1999, especially Chapter 1 and pp. 119-136, on the
consolidation of establishmentarian unionism and the “tripartite”
system of managerial planning between the government, the captains
of industry, and the labor bosses of the official unions.

[52] Under
the smothering patronage of the Wagner/Taft-Hartley labor
bureaucracy, official unions gained new political privileges that
made them the most effective vehicles for workers’ short-term goals,
allowing them to out-compete the unsubsidized unions. But the price
of government privileges were government controls: the NLRB system
constrained union goals to mediated settlements with management, and
in 1947 the Taft-Hartley Act pulled official union tactics firmly
into the regulatory grip of the managerial State. Union methods are
legally restricted to collective bargaining and limited strikes.
Strikes cannot legally be expanded to secondary or general strikes,
and any strike can be—as many strikes have been—broken by the
arbitrary fiat of the President of the United States. Obvious
violations of the freedom of contract—such as the ban on union
hiring halls and “closed shop” contracts—strip
officially-recognized unions of effective tactics and sap their
resources. The emphasis on collective bargaining and bureaucratic
mediation favors centralized union bureaucracies over more
decentralized, democratic forms of organization. Thus both the
internal culture of the post-Wagner union establishment and the
external controls of federal and state regulations have conspired to
enrich a select class of professional unionists while hamstringing
the labor movement as a whole and limiting progress for
rank-and-file workers.

[53] “Vulgar
libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term ‘free market’ in an equivocal
sense; they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next,
whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market
principles. So we get the standard boilerplate article in The Freeman [on sweatshop
labor] arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because
‘that’s not how the free market works’—implicitly assuming that this
is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the
present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state
intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away
with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on
the basis of ‘free market principles’” (Carson 2004,
142).

[54] For
an extensive discussion of the nature of the corporate State and the
role of government patronage in the formation of actually existing
capitalism, see especially part two of Carson 2004
and Kolko 1963.

[55] It
is important to remember that the calculation problem, as variously
formulated, has to do either with the lack of market pricing or with
the dispersal of idiosyncratic knowledge, not essentially with the
use of coercive means. Political coercion is one of the most
effective ways to stifle negotiation and shove people with
idiosyncratic knowledge out of the way. But it is not the only way;
voluntary structures can block the flow of knowledge no less than
coercive ones. Cf. Rothbard 1962,
Chapter 10, Section F on the
calculation problems that would be faced by One Big Cartel, even
without government intervention.

[56] See
Long 2005 for an economic analysis of the trade-offs involved in
increasing the size of firms and the economic factors that would
tend towards greater decentralization in a free market.

[57] Whether
or not Southern secessionism was closely linked with slavery is –
God help us all – still a matter of considerable controversy in
libertarian intellectual circles. But see Hummel 1996 for a
persuasive argument that while the Federal government’s
motives in pursuing the Civil War had little to do with freeing
slaves, the Confederate states’ motives for seceding were
dominated by the desire to perpetuate and expand race slavery.

[58] The
most dramatic historical example of this line of argument can be found in the
work of Lysander Spooner, who penned No
Treason (1867-1870) as a defense of the moral right of the Southern
states to secede from the Union, but also published a “Plan for the Abolition of Slavery” (1858)
which called on slaves and non-slaveholding whites to launch a guerrilla war
against Southern slaveholders, with aid and comfort provided by Northern
abolitionists. Thus in No Treason, Spooner stated that “The result
– and a natural one – has been that we have had governments, State and national,
devoted to nearly every grade and species of crime that governments have ever
practised upon their victims; and these crimes have culminated in a war that has
cost a million of lives; a war carried on, upon one side, for chattel slavery,
and on the other for political slavery; upon neither for liberty, justice, or
truth” (No. II, § X ¶
2). Hummel 1996 offers an excellent
historical defense of a similar view of the secession crisis and the Civil
War.

[59] A project like this one cannot be undertaken without accumulating debts. My own are too
numerous to give an accounting of them all; but in particular I would like to
thank Laura Breitenbeck and Roderick Long for patience, inspiration,
collaboration, encouragement, and detailed and very helpful comments.

Welcome Farkers: I noticed (from the massive surge in impacts on my web server) that this post — in particular, Jourdon Anderson’s letter to his former captor, which I originally found through stuff white people do (2009-04-28) — was recently featured on the front page of Fark.com. I’m flattered; and presumably this also means that for the time being I’ll be getting a lot of readers who are more or less new to the blog. By way of introduction, to who I am, where I’m coming from, and what I care about, you might check out the links at GT 2009-01-29: Welcome, Antiwarriors.

Quote for the Day: After the end of the Civil War, many former slavers tried to contact the black men and women they had once enslaved — even those who had escaped during the war and headed north — to try to convince them to return to the plantation and work the land as hands or tenant farmers. One of those freedmen, Jourdon Anderson, wrote a letter back to his former captor, explaining the terms on which would return. This may be my favorite thing that I read all week. Emphasis is added.

Dayton, Ohio, August 7, 1865

To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson
Big Spring, Tennessee

Sir: I got your letter and was glad to find you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Col. Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville hospital, but one of the neighbors told me Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.

I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here; I get $25 a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy (the folks here call her Mrs. Anderson), and the children, Milly, Jane and Grundy, go to school and are learning well; the teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday School, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated; sometimes we overhear others saying, Them colored people were slaves down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks, but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Col. Anderson. Many darkies would have been proud, as I used to was, to call you master. Now, if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost Marshal General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you are sincerely disposed to treat us justly and kindly—and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future.

I served you faithfully for thirty-two years and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add to this the interest for the time our wages has been kept back and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams Express, in care of V. Winters, esq, Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night, but in Tennessee there was never any pay day for the Negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.

In answering this letter please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die if it comes to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.

The invasion begins tomorrow:SubRosa community space (2009-05-02): First Ever Santa Cruz Anarchist Convergence! May 7-11. The Santa Cruz Anarchist Convergence is coming to town! Yes, here, between the forest and the ocean, among the students and the yuppies, where Santa Cruz anarchists have fostered a close-knit community dedicated to destruction of this world and the creation of another. Santa Cruz is a hub of anarchist culture and resistance, with a long history of radical struggle and active anarchist projects spanning decades. Santa Cruz is proud to host the Santa Cruz Anarchist Convergence, a four-day anarchist event for building community and resistance and sharing radical ideas.

I’d be pissed if I weren’t beyond caring about anything the LP says or does. Individual party members are often perfectly good people, and well worth talking to, and well worth inviting to something new and better; but the party, as an organization, is worth taking notice of only as an enemy, to be shoved out of the way along with the rest of the belligerent busybody Know-Nothing creeps.

On the production of knowledge in a peer-to-peer society:Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation (2009-04-27): Ryan Lanham: dissolving universities?. I think that the discussion underestimates the importance of architecture and physical space in creating scholarly community; I think it also underestimates what I think would be the most noticeable effect of less businesslike, more mutualistic universities, without the distorting effects of state funding and state-imposed accreditation systems — that they would be smaller, more numerous, and less oriented towards churning out professional degrees in subjects that would be better taught completely outside of the university setting, if not for the political-economic distortions that shove them into institutional structures where they don’t belong. I also protest the notion that there’s something wrong with esoteric subject-matters or that best-selling authors, just as such, somehow have a better grip on what’s relevant than scholars working intensely on a tightly-focused subject. (Surely they have a better grip on what’s relevant to people outside the University. But that’s not necessarily the kind of relevance that a University ought to be concerned with.) But I agree that Universities are set for a radical change, in an increasingly peer-to-peer world, and that the change will involve less institutional aping of business, a more mutualistic orientation, and hopefully less credentialism. It’s an important discussion and this is a good start.

Aster in Bangkok:
Here is the relevant video. from Buffy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wF6khBKrmQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkQPotX4_7M&feature=related
I love this song too much.
The audio is better on the first play, but …
[2009-05-31 5:48:54 am]

Vic:
This letter gives cause for reflection. It is a testimony to both the arrogance of the slave master and the …
[2009-06-07 12:41:52 pm]

In a comment over at Roderick’s place, William Gillis has this to say by of encapsulating his worries about (his reading of) Kevin Carson’s emphasis on economic localism:

To clarfiy, my doubts regarding what’s often addressed (not entirely correctly, I agree) as the interrelating two-sided work of you and Kevin is really just my distaste for Localism and Rights-based ethics.

And I’m sorry you caught the backdraft of my annoyance with what is clearly primarily Kevin’s contribution re: Localism. (Note: I don’t mean local sufficiency or DIY tech, but the focus on stable regional communities, as opposed to a gleaming interconnected mass society on hoverbikes.)

That’s beautiful, and it deserves a response in kind. So here’s my attempt to put down my own view on the matter. When I have my hoverbike, I’ll use it for a lot of things, and one of the things I hope to be able to do is to fly through uncountable different neighborhoods within the gleaming metropolis. Don’t forget that even New Tokyo will have neighborhoods, or at least I hope it will, because a city with no neighborhoods isn’t worth a damn. The always-ready hyperlocal holographic social networking mapping mash-up that shimmers into existence over my hoverbike dash will help me find landmarks and fascinating holes-in-the-wall and the good old hang-outs and the hot new things, with help from the interwoven knowledge of friends, visitors, and longtime locals. Some of the neighborhoods may be glass and steel; others may be orchards and wheat fields and villages; others campus gothic spires, grassy quads and libraries; others may be permaculture cities of green roofs and hanging gardens. They will speak many different languages; some will be young and others old; some will be slow and stable over time, and others will be frenetic and constantly changing. Some may be stable in structure while constantly changing in population (think of a University campus), and others may be exactly the reverse (think of an indie rock scene). Which ones are the best to visit, or to live in, will depend on the circumstances of life for each of us. (What you want by way of stability or surroundings when you’re 50 may be different from what you want when you’re 19. What I want at 27 may be different from what you want at 27. What I want in the summer may be different from what I want in the fall.) And that’s what’s beautiful about it. It’s the neighborhoods that makes the city glorious. But without the city, and the hoverbikes to fly through it, there wouldn’t be the neighborhoods, either. There would only be warehouses, deserts, and fortresses.

Which is another way of saying that I don’t think the issue here is really, or at least ought to be, one of (stable) localism versus (dynamic) globalism, or cosmopolitanism, or what have you. There is, I think (oh Lord) a dialectical solution. It has to do with the extent to which the local and the global are allowed to evolve and flourish together, or, on the other hand, are mediated, battered, and fortified, by rigidifed political fabrications (like Nations, States, Law-and-Order, Smart Growth planning committees, Stupid Growth planning committees, Development fetishes, Tradition fetishes, bigots, bashers, macho squads, and all the other forms of structured power-over that would bulldoze and blockade and wall off ghettoes rather than letting neighborhoods grow).

There have been several lengthy threads of conversation going on in the comments of some of this week’s posts. The purpose of this post is to disentangle one of those threads to make the conversation more easily found and more easily followed.

Speaking as the editor, I will mention that I’ve done a bit to prune off some diverging conversations — e.g. some interesting discussion about group rights and individual rights — that began in some of the comments I’m posting, and have excerpted (with editorial marks) accordingly; you can follow those discussions on the original thread. It’s not that I don’t care; it’s just that the purpose of this post is to try and extract a kind-of straightforward thread of conversation, leaving things that go off at a 45 degree angle to be discussed in spaces of their own. Also, I’ve tended to mash together comments that were made by the same person when one was made right after the other.

If that is the case, then thank Prometheus for that. As wishful as it sounds, it’s a welcome antidote to the left-libertarian tendency to treat localism and decentralization as THE POINT rather than an instrumental tool to some more fundamental desire. That shit’s also vulnerable to corruption by every kind of village fascism under the sun. Hence the enabling attitude toward things like National Anarchism coming from Keith Preston and Jeremy Weiland that almost makes ANTIFA-style gang beatdowns seem like a more intelligent response to the phenomenon.

. . .

Oh, and speaking of Sarah, I hear she’s going to be living on a farm in South Dakota. Not exactly futurist utopia.

—[Soviet Onion (2009-04-24, 1:39am / 2:20am)][2]

Aster:

Soviet-

All of this is well put. As wishful as it sounds, it’s a welcome antidote to the left-libertarian tendency to treat localism and decentralization as THE POINT rather than an instrumental tool to some more fundamental desire. That shit’s also vulnerable to corruption by every kind of village fascism under the sun. Hence the enabling attitude toward things like National Anarchism coming from Keith Preston and Jeremy Weiland that almoAst makes ANTIFA-style gang beatdowns seem like a more intelligent response to the phenomenon.

It is hard for me to express how much I appreciate your speaking out against the national anarchist Trojan horse. Thank you.

And that’s precisely it- replacing rights with decentralism completely throws out the principle of liberty. I want the implementation of a specific social system which guarantees individual rights and supports individual autonomy. I’m not interested in a politics which switches this for the goal of acceptance of existing social systems. whether individualist or not. Liberty requires a conscious and rational set of values and institutions which are incompatible with traditional organic society.

I’m a moderate on decentralisation- actually, I think the original 1789 American federal system buttressed by an extensive and enforceable Bill of Rights fully incorporated against local tyranny is a fairly good model. I’m at the moment inclined to say yes to decentralisation in economic matters, no in educational matters, and to favour a mixed system in politics. I think we do need broad regional social organisation in a form which maintains an easy flow of goods, people, and ideas- I think this aspect of the Roman, British, and American empires was a good thing (have you read Isabel Paterson’s God of the Machine?).

As wishful as it sounds, it’s a welcome antidote to the left-libertarian tendency to treat localism and decentralization as THE POINT rather than an instrumental tool to some more fundamental desire. That shit’s also vulnerable to corruption by every kind of village fascism under the sun.

Whaddaya expect from me aside from twinkles. We agree, of course. I’d write more on the issue but you’re particularly eloquent on this and I’ve never entirely felt it was my place to start shit in the ALL. Left-Libertarianism is someone else’s parlor. I’m a post-leftie transhumanist utilitarian who wants to slaughter the rich, turn their mansions into coops and then enact full blooded Anarcho-Capitalism as a door prop on the long road to actual Anarchism. I’ve never fully belonged to the Carson/Long project. If you want to start something, either calling shit out or strengthening the foundations of an alternative Left-Libertarianism then, by all means I urge you to.

As wishful as it sounds, it’s a welcome antidote to the left-libertarian tendency to treat localism and decentralization as THE POINT rather than an instrumental tool to some more fundamental desire. That shit’s also vulnerable to corruption by every kind of village fascism under the sun.

I agree that localism and decentralism ought not to be fetishized at the expense of other goals (either respect for rights or other cultural goals that my thick conception of libertarianism is entangled with), and that the value of localism and decentralism ought mainly to be treated as a strategic value, not as something that is desirable in itself. (When it ends up being something I’d consider desirable in itself, and not merely strategically, it’s because certain forms of centralism and antilocalism are themselves expressions of classism, racism, or other forms of elite bigotry, all of which I do consider objectionable in themselves, apart from any strategic considerations.)

For reference, when you refer to a left-libertarian tendency to fetishize localism and decentralism, do you have anyone particular in mind, other than Jeremy Weiland? (There’s also Keith Preston, presumably, but he doesn’t consistently identify as a left-libertarian, and in any case I’m not willing to grant him the description.) If so, whom?

Aster,

I’m a moderate on decentralisation- actually, I think the original 1789 American federal system buttressed by an extensive and enforceable Bill of Rights fully incorporated against local tyranny is a fairly good model.

. . . And, for the record, I’m not a supporter of National Anarchism. I disagree with them (mostly in the sense that I refuse to take a positive position on what a free society looks like, nor will I work towards that vision in lieu of actually freeing humans. But I would consider working with them on a case by case basis if it served my interests). I don’t know what you mean about “enabling” them, though, so I can’t say whether or not I do that. I’m aware of the fact that many groups exist whose ideologies I disagree with, and I see no reason to elevate their existence over the existence of more concentrated, institutionalized power structures as a motivating issue for me.

It is harder to criminalize acts, let alone criminalize people, when people can walk across the border and out of reach of the criminalizers.

I think intentional communities can be important.

That said, there is an incredible difference between asserting the right of the individual to seek better communities, and claiming a right of a community to condemn certain individuals.

In my admittedly incomplete understanding, collectivist anarchism has historically involved either or both of two kinds of community control. The first being near-monopolistic but temporary; a transitional confederation instead of Marx’s transitional state. I think this was Bakunin’s pragmatic proposal. The second being community control of specific institutions, but neither requiring participation nor forbidding competition.

I think Parecon has sowed the seeds of Prestonism, because it imagines a permanent system which subjects individual choices to community decision, and forbids independent exchange. … And the primitivists like that!

My name is being mentioned far too often in this thread. Color me uncomfortable.

I don’t fetishize localism or decentralism - I simply see it as a means to an end. I may place a higher importance on those means, but so what? I don’t see anybody else demonstrating a better strategy (it is just a strategy - if you want to talk about what that more fundamental desire is, we can do that).

What is the end, the core desire? For me, it’s the standard R.A. Wilson line: achieving an honest society where people can tell the truth, or more technically, a society where individuals can maximally express themselves within the collective. For me, the end is authentic, sustainable society. Breaking up concentrations of power is just a means to this end.

Just so we’re clear about where I stand, I part ways with you all mostly on your insistence on a universal morality against which one can judge affairs (thick libertarianism as a motivating ideology). I don’t claim that there’s a right way to live, and so I don’t take, for instance, my opposition to fascist societies in some panarchist future as a directive for which I must find justification in morality or natural law or whatever. I’m quite comfortable opposing it because, well, that’s just how I feel about the matter. I have my reasons, but ultimately they are grounded in something either arbitrary (and inaccessable) or intrinsic to reality (and therefore accessible without needing codification and legalisms).

The truth or significance of that feeling is something we can talk about, but it has more to do with my own journey than some ideology. That is where I feel I diverge from thick libertarianism. I support most thick libertarian values because I support them, not because they’re right.

Prestonism is a reference, I must assume, to his core position that human beings are inherently tribal, and that therefore the most we can work towards is a cross-ideological alliance against the state rather than the everlasting victory of left libertarian ideology? Whether or not I like that view of humans, I must say it seems to map well to human history and experience. Most people don’t give a damn about liberty, in fact. That does [not] preclude a left libertarian agenda in any way, I would think.

As far as I know, his critique of thick libertarianism has never been responded to, which is unfortunate; we could all benefit from a informed debate involving Johnson, Long, et al.

But I would consider working with them on a case by case basis if it served my interests).

Just out of curiosity, what do you imagine as a case in which it would serve your interests to work with National Anarchists?

Just so we’re clear about where I stand, I part ways with you all mostly on your insistence on a universal morality against which one can judge affairs (thick libertarianism as a motivating ideology).

The thick-thin debate is not a debate about moral universalism. It’s a debate about something else. Most people with a thin conception of libertarianism are moral universalists; they just have a different view of what kind of further commitments the moral virtue of justice might recommend. And it’s perfectly possible (although I wouldn’t recommend it; but that’s because I’m a moral universalist) to be an anti-universalistic thick libertarian; indeed, it’s quite possible to advance a view on which some form of anti-universalism or anti-moralism is one of the further commitments that libertarianism recommends. (That seems to be what some Stirnerite and Nietzschean anarchists believe. It also seems to be what you’ve spent the past several months arguing, while claiming that you’re critiquing thick conceptions of libertarianism. The fact that you lay a lot of stress on a very broad-ranging form of social tolerance does not mean that you’re opposing the bundling of further social commitments together with libertarianism. It means that you may disagree with those of us who have a more activist stance in the culture wars about what sort of social commitments ought to be bundled.)

As far as I know, his [Keith Preston’s] critique of thick libertarianism has never been responded to, which is unfortunate; we could all benefit from a informed debate involving Johnson, Long, et al.

There are a lot of reasons why I haven’t yet published a response to Preston’s article. If I do it is likely to be a series of responses to short points rather than an attempt at extended dialogue in a single essay. I will say here that part of the problem with Preston’s essay is that it is an extended attack on something other than what he starts off claiming to be attacking; it’s not a critique of thick conceptions of libertarianism at all, but rather a critique of left-libertarianism (or more specifically some aspects of the cultural program advanced by, e.g., Roderick and me, as part of the left component of left-libertarianism). The two are not identical; left-libertarianism, at least as Roderick and I present it, is a species of thick libertarianism, but there are many other kinds; notably, as I’ve repeatedly tried to stress Hoppean paleolibertarians, and orthodox Objectivists are each advancing their own thick conceptions of libertarianism. What I differ with them on is notthick libertarianism — the idea that libertarianism is best seen as one strand within a bundle of interrelated and reinforcing political, cultural, or philosophical commitments, which is one of the very few ideas on which the Hoppeans, the ARIans, and I all agree with each other — but rather the specific commitments that they are trying to bundle in. There are several related and entangled but importantly distinct and conceptually distinguishable issues that Preston is attempting to treat, and I don’t think that the essay does a very good job of distinguishing them carefully. (Which is why thick libertarianism ends up getting used over and over again as if it named a distinctive ideology, rather than what it is, a cluster of picky philosophical distinctions that might help categorize a number of different ideological positions. It’s also why the essay jumbles together several different arguments about several different topics, with very little in the way of anything that actually attempts to engage the work I did on distinguishing, explaining and justifying several different kinds of relationships that might connect the struggle against the state with other values in the thick bundle. This kind of jumbling makes fruitful discussion much harder to carry on, and much more work to prepare.

Aster: I’m a moderate on decentralisation- actually, I think the original 1789 American federal system buttressed by an extensive and enforceable Bill of Rights fully incorporated against local tyranny is a fairly good model.

Charles: Huh? Why? It doesn’t seem to have worked out very well so far.

Me again:

It depends what you compare it to. If you compare it to the best system I think human beings are possible of creating, undoubtably it’s inferior. But if you consider it in the context of that vast slaughterbench of individuals known as human history, it looks more like a miraculously achievement. Certainly, the system is on the edge of failing now. But the very partial, irregular, and inconsistent virtues which the system has shown in the last two centuries is still an unspeakable achievement in a world in which the norm is the closed society. I’m alive today. I can’t ever forget that in any previous age, given my ideas and gender transition, I would never have made it this far.

I think part of the difference in our outlooks is that I look at freedom as a positive construction. I don’t see a natural state of freedom which government, elites, or capital has stolen from us. I see a natural baseline of tribal dictatorship- animal society knows nothing of the individual- which humans have with slow and tortured cumulative effort managed to partially replace with a form of society which allows for some degree of human freedom. We should certainly work and demand more than what we have, but we should also remain aware that the creation of conditions in which the individual personality is even partially free to be herself requires a set of social and material conditions in tension with a state of nature.

I used to consider myself a borderline anarchist, but I don’t any longer. (let me stress that unlike orthodox Objectivists I am not hostile to anarchism). The reason has to do primarily with an experience in the anarchist scene.

Some months before I arrived in Wellington, a female anarchist accused a male anarchist of rape. Prior to this, everything I’ve seen suggests that relations within the community were entirely peaceful- zero aggression beyond the level of dishonestly leaving dishes for the next person to clean up. So when this happened, it was a social shock. People picked sides. People got accused of covering up for a rapist and/or damning someone as a rapist without evidence (I have a strong opiniong about who was telling the truth, but I won’t discuss it here). The result ruined friendships, hurt a community involving hundreds of people, and hovered like a ghost over every subsequent practical or ideological disagreement, long after the victim herself clearly expressed an authentic desire to move on.

The reason the problem kept reverberating is because there was no way to finally and publicly resolve the dispute. Any standing body which was recognised as making a judgement which counted would be… authority, heirarchy, a government. There was clearly a view that things should work themselves out, that things like this shouldn’t happen in a nonheirarchical community… and, indeed, this was a singular and exceptional occurrance within a very honest and safe group of people. But this one aggression had catastrophic results. There was no way to deal with it. And as far as I could see, it was all very tied to the idea that harmony was natural, that interference in that harmony felt wrong. The result of an informality of structure was that everyone ended up supporting their friends and allies and communal trust never entirely recovered. Ironically, the political result of all of this was the creation of a ‘safer spaces’ policy which worked as de facto law but without objective and accountable methods. And the de facto law caused more problems for human freedom than would a written law which explicity set up an authoritative institution.

The conclusion I came out of this was: law is valuable. I don’t mean enforcement, police, prisons, that sort of stuff. I mean that it is better to have publicly written institutions that set up standards rather than trusting society to work itself out. You need formal principles which don’t spring out of the ground, which have to be set up, written down, and applied in a regular manner within a community- for in the absence of formal rules, you get not no rules but tribal rules.

After this, and for other reasons, I started becoming very conscious of the fact that the social relations we take for granted depend on a prior structure of civilisation which makes public dealings possible. A civil society may, from a certain angle, be self-organising. But for that social organisation to work (especially if you want it to work in a dircection of individualism and freedom*) one needs a background set of institutions and values which have to be constructively built. And in that light, partially liberal societies start looking much more half-full than half-empty. Freedom isn’t a birthright that dark forces have stolen from us; freedom is a positive accomplishment made possible by the invention of better social structures. And if we wish- as we should- to seek more freedom, we should look at this not as tearing down but as building higher. Those who do think we will find our freedom primarily by breaking and tearing down are mistaken- and are easy prey for people who don’t like a free society and can abuse the naivete of radicals to make them dig their own graves.

It goes deeper. If you look at an anarchist community, one quickly becomes aware that one is dealing with unusually good people. Nice people. Considerate people. Idealistic people. People who don’t often think of stealing and lying as available options. And they’re often quite privileged people- people who haven’t known as much pain and others and for that very reasons are capable of being more kind and idealistic. That such people exist is a very good thing- the world desperately needs such people and would be very wise not to despise idealists and creators.

But precisely because most bohemians are nice, they create social systems based upon the assumption that their kind of psychology is a given. They take for granted a great deal of civilisation which is unconscious to them. But that social psychology is as a rule a product of favourable circumstances- such as an enriching, leisurely childhood. If one wants to be rude, it’s also sustained by flat out privilege- the characteristic ethical blindspot of bohemians is the assumption that the world owes us a living.

But most importantly, the anarchist way of life is built upon an immense complex of civilisation structure carried around inside the human mind. The better world for which anarchism advocates is built upon all the (to my mind, correct) assumptions of this one. When we fault the injustices of the states that came out of the liberal institutions, we’re right, but our capacity to be right is itself the product of the startling success of those revolutions- Thoreau says something like this in On the Duty of Civil Disobedience. Even our capacity to think and value more finely and treat others with more human dignity is a product of more humane conditions. Those who criticise the illiberalism of the best existing systems today are themselves the continuing success of those systems. We can criticise them because they won (and, if they fall, we will lose the right to criticise).

Yes, Americs and all the other liberal democracies were set up by rich dead white men who forgot to include anybody but themselves. But the fact that they included anyone is, by historical standards, an unspeakable improvement and a breathtaking experiment. Throughout human history poverty, superstition, fear, hatred, collectivism, atrocity, and war have been the order of the day. I find it horrible to think about what life for the average person- averaged over our entire history- has really been like. Everyone reading this is privileged beyond sane possibility by any previous standard. And that includes politics- we’re able to posit the possibility of stateless societies because previous social architects managed the feat of creating working liberal societies.

The success of anarchism would mean that we’ve completely humanised the human condition. The anarchist possibility is a hypercivilisation. Anarchism is not a negation of bourgeois tyranny- it’s an avante-garde continuation of the principles of the older bourgeois liberal revolutions. The revolution (at least one we want) will not break the structures of oppreesion. It will build the structures of freedom another level higher. Anti-racism, feminism, LGBT rights are some of the most recent, the most fragile, and the most difficult of these accomplishments. They are not reversals of the betrayals of 1776 and 1789; they are their most wild successes. And the fact that life after 1776 and 1789 was still a tytannical Hell for most people isn’t something I’ve forgetting- again, I could never have survived if I has been born even one generation ago.

And in that context, I’m grateful to those dead white men and their state- even if to get my freedom, it is them I have to fight with extensions of their own principles.

America’s dying today- but it’s dying precisely because it is guided by people who have abandoned the spiritual infrastructure of liberal civilisation- by a ruling class whose level of thinking is an illiterate mess of delusion and pragmatism incapable of sustaining a free society. Any system would fail in the direction of tyranny under the same circumstances.

#

One technical point- what I was broadly praising wasn’t the actual American system (past or present), but an ahistorical conjunction of the best parts from different periods- an 18th century ‘conservative’ limited government with 20th century ‘liberal’ provisions for rights enforcement. If I was going to write a model political blueprint I’d change any number of things (a longer bill of rights, proportional representation, a parliamentary system, nix the stupid electoral college).

But I still think what we need is a consciously selected society based upon specific and rationally validated values. A society in which individuals may do what they wish requires an insistence that societies operate by individualist principles, with an establishment of appropriate civil and formal institutions. You can have a society whee individuals are left alone or you can leave societies alone to dispose as they please with individuals- you can’t have both.

It depends what you compare it to. If you compare it to the best system I think human beings are possible of creating, undoubtably it’s inferior. But if you consider it in the context of that vast slaughterbench of individuals known as human history, it looks more like a miraculously achievement.

I don’t think that it worked out better than other competing proposals which were made at the time would have worked out. For example, if we’re comparing different proposed governments, then it ought to be noted one of the chief accomplishments of the United States Constitution, as compared with the earlier Articles of Confederation was that the U.S. Constitution was deliberately designed to substantially increase centralization, in particular to grant the general government wide powers to impose national taxes and to pass and enforce Fugitive Slave Acts. The first was a substantial reason for its political success at the North; the second was a substantial reason for its political success at the South. I don’t consider either of these an advance over what came before.

How much of an achievement it looks like depends on where you’re looking at it from. There isn’t much of a miracle there for the Shawnee, or the Lakota, or for Africans, or for African-Americans, or for the Filipinos (1,000,000+ dead thanks to a war that could not have happened but for the war machine that a centralized U.S. made possible), or for the Vietnamese (4,000,000 dead from the same cause a few decades later), not just because it failed to improve things but because it made things actively worse than they were before under the status quo ante. It’s not enough to say, Yes, that’s terrible, but the alternatives were just as bad or worse. They weren’t, not for the people who have gotten the heel of the boot under the U.S. government. It’s one thing to say that the ideals that motivated some aspects of the founding events of the U.S. could, if radicalized and universalized, bring liberation for everyone (I agree with that, and often say so); but it’s important not to miss the fact that not only weren’t they, but in fact the selective versions were often used to enable the elite to inflict much more violence, sometimes genocidal violence, on those who were cast outside of the magic circle.

If you want to go looking for less-lethal states, they exist, but I don’t think that anything like the U.S.A. could possibly qualify. San Marino, maybe; Switzerland, maybe. I have problems with these states, as I do with any other, but I can see citing them as examples of societies which manage to rise above the general bloodbath of recorded history. But certainly not anything that has ever been done under the United States Constitution.

America’s dying today

Q: When was it ever alive?

I think part of the difference in our outlooks is that I look at freedom as a positive construction. I don’t see a natural state of freedom which government, elites, or capital has stolen from us.

But that’s not my view either.

I’m not trying to recover a primordial state. I view freedom as an achievement for the future; the question is by what means it can be achieved. My complaint is not that you’re proposing a structure; it’s that you’re proposing a structure which has been tried and found wanting, and which there are good reasons to consider structurually predisposed to the slaughter, enslavement, war, and torture that has been committed under its name since the day that it was signed. The reason that I want the State to get out of the way is not because I expect everything to fix itself automatically once people are left alone. It would do a handy job of automatically fixing some things — nobody but states builds atomic bombs; nobody but states starves people to death in the name of de-kulakization/industrial modernization/intellectual property rights in DNA/opium prohibition/etc. But there are many things that need to be worked out through conscious effort and activism and the building of social structures and institutions.

So when you say:

The conclusion I came out of this was: [explicit] law is valuable.

I agree with you, but I don’t know why that’s an argument against anarchism, or in favor of the United States Constitution. Anarchism doesn’t mean dispensing with all written precepts for social conduct or with any possible sort of juridical institution. It means dispensing with the State. There are plenty of ways of getting explicit law, and institutions which write down laws based on rational deliberation and criticism, and juridical institutions which apply law or judgment to concrete cases, based on consensual association and without any kind of state. That’s been precisely the point of market anarchist theory since the get-go. The idea is not to get rid of orderly dispute resolution, but rather to stop the State from violently suppressing alternative forms of it.

Without the State, you can’t have finally unaccountable juridical institutions, and you can’t have written laws which are passed off as binding solely because of the political position of those who wrote them down. But I consider that a virtue, not a defect, because the need for institutions which allow for holding aggressors accountable, and for settling disputes through deliberation about right, rather than by means of brute force, doesn’t just apply when it comes to encounters between one citizen and another. It also applies when it comes to encounters between the citizen and the State; but there’s no way to get that as long as the State remains a state. The state as such is lawless in its encounters with the people it claims the right to rule; so if you think that law is valuable, that’s a reason to oppose the state, not a reason to support it.

As for the particular case you mention, that’s awful, and all too familiar. I’ve encountered plenty of similar situations in anarchist scenes around the U.S. in the past. I think existing anarchist scenes do a very bad job of supporting women and a very bad job of responding to rape in particular. But (1) so does the State, as we both know; (2) partly because of male supremacy, which is everywhere at the moment, but partly also for reasons that have specifically to do with the legal and juridical structure of the state (because state-centric criminal law handle crimes of violence as a matter of the State’s interest in preserving public order, not as a matter of vindicating the rights of individual victims; no surprise that D.A.s and cops are typically incredibly unresponsive to the needs of women, especially when it comes to a crime typically committed within the private sphere); and (3) the problems with the existing anarchist scene only suggest a problem with anarchism as such, or a reason to favor the state, if there are no realistically available ways to deal with a situation like this using anarchistic methods. But there are ways to deal with it. I’m all for people involved in organizing anarchist spaces getting together and writing down, and taking seriously, policies about how to deal with sexual violence or other issues that are likely to come up in a social space. (I’ve personally written plenty of policies, back when I was involved with planning an anarchist convention some years back.) Those people in the scene who think that any such attempt to do so amounts to government (for ill or for good) are, well, wrong — not just wrong about how to deal with the problems of interpersonal violence, but also wrong about what government is and what it is anarchism is opposed to.

But I still think what we need is a consciously selected society based upon specific and rationally validated values.

O.K. But isn’t that a reason to favor a form of social organization in which peaceful people are free to select their political institutions, rather than one in which a predetermined set of political institutions are violently imposed on them regardless of their consciously selected preferences?

A society in which individuals may do what they wish requires an insistence that societies operate by individualist principles, with an establishment of appropriate civil and formal institutions.

Anarchism does not preclude civil or formal institutions.

The success of anarchism would mean that we’ve completely humanised the human condition. The anarchist possibility is a hypercivilisation.

O.K., sure; but the question is how we get there from here. If what you mean as the process of civilization is something like, getting from a condition of chaotic or semistructured violence, to a condition of social peace, then I agree that building social structure is part of the process. But there are different kinds of social structures, and the state is only one among many. It’s only one among many possible structures; it’s also only one among many of structures that have actually operated in history. (Here are some others, which did not derive from a centralized state: the norms and institutions of academe, friendly societies, labor unions, churches, synagogues, the Law Merchant, the English common law of torts and contracts, etc. Some of these are beneficent, others baleful, and most are a mixture of the two.) The question is whether the level of social peace that some people are privileged to enjoy today was brought about by the state, or by other structures without the help of the state, or by other structures in spite of the state; I think the answer is mostly the last. And further, it’s a question of whether, going forward, centralized state methods are likely to advance or to hold back the cause of greater civilization and social peace. I think, looking at what the state actually does do most of the time it is doing something, and looking at what states are always going to be most likely to do, given the way that they are structured, that the question is not a hard one to answer.

One technical point- what I was broadly praising wasn’t the actual American system (past or present), but an ahistorical conjunction of the best parts from different periods- an 18th century ‘conservative’ limited government with 20th century ‘liberal’ provisions for rights enforcement.

I hope that you’d also include some other innovations besides the Incorporation Doctrine that also weren’t part of the Founding elite’s interpretation of the Constitution ca. 1790 — for example, the Thirteenth Amendment.

That said, if we’re now going to be looking at political systems which have never existed at any point in history, and which to be sustainable would also (as you argue) require a different culture and civil society, which does not now exist and never has existed and would involve a really radical transformation of what does now exist — then it seems like I can help myself to the same sort of hope and activism for the sort of radical transformation in culture and civil society which would make anarchy practical, sustainable, and desirable.

Yeah, I was going to point out what Charles did for himself. You were attacking a strawman. The federated organizations imagined by anarcho-communists are fantastically consciously constructed. The minarchist-market anarchist debate is over whether competitive defense services can achieve a individualist liberal rule of law — not over the desirability of orderly proceedings per se. There are also a lot of relatively minor disputes in life where the state doesn’t intervene without chaos resulting. A serious rape accusation is arguably something for an objective court of law, but a verbal scuffle with my mom isn’t.

Charles,

How would you answer a person pointing out Lawrence vs Texas, Brown vs Board of Education, and civil rights legislation passed on the national level?

Incidentally, the Brown vs Board of Education decision occurred in the context of compulsory schooling. You were compelled via taxes to support a racist school structure — no doubt said taxes fell on black and white alike.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the County of Bohemia, or any place subject to her jurisdiction. Actually, involuntary servitude even as punishment for real crime just makess people nastier and isn’t exactly productive. Forced labour as restitution for aggression is a maybe, but it sounds way open to abuse.

Section II:

One more thing. It’s still involuntary servitude if you force someone to carry a gun and murder foreigners- actually, that’s even worse. And mandatory volunteerism- you guessed it, ‘involuntary servitude’!

Section III:

Oh, and that includes your wife. And your children. Don’t give that look- no, your wife and children aren’t your personal beasts of burden or fuck-toys. I don’t care if ‘your culture’ says otherwise. Tough.

Section IV:

It’s still involuntary servitude if you make the kid go to a big ugly building and bore them to death and call it ‘education’.

Section V:

It probably doesn’t count if it’s your dog or your cow, but we can discuss that issue. Maybe. Torturing millions of veal calves in factory farms does have a really bad slaveryish feel to it. Cats go under ‘implied non-applicability’- you can’t tell them what to do anyway. Actually, this amendment has an exception regarding you in relation to your cat. Obey her or else, not like you can resist.

Section VI.

The principle applies to places not subject to the jurisdiction of the County of Bohemia too, but this isn’t an excuse to bomb foreigners and take their stuff. Or to get other foreigners to ruin their livelihoods so they have to work in your sweatshops for virtually nothing. It even applies to BROWN people, believe it or not- and the fact that it took you this long to figure that out means you suck.

Section VII. Aster shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. Actually, anyone who wants to stop a slavery situation should feel empowered to do it. Figuring out the enforcement and incentive structures will be a bitch, though- but that’s not an excuse for giving up and just letting slavery happen, Keith.

Section VIII: And the clever loophole in these rules you figured out is NOT OK. Slavery=BAD, if you were missing the point here.

Section IX: And if you were thinking that of course this principle applied to everyone but you- well, then you were wrong.

Charles said most of what I would have. I’m very much in favor of polycentric law, specifically because I think it’s a kind of decentralization (not be confused with mutually-exclusive “localisms” a la Hoppestan/anarcho-communism, ‘cause that shit’s wack) that manages to incorporate the entire cosmopolis in a competitive and collaborative project(+). It’s the kind of decentralization that incorporates multiple overlapping world-strands instead segregating into little chunks where oppressive conditions can entrench themselves. It’s decentralized only in the sense that the same globalized process is taking place everywhere. The center is everywhere. Perhaps a better term for this is “system redundancy”, or even just competition.

The standard market anarchist talking point posits a competitive system of law and security in which no one is compelled to pay for enforcement they don’t want or seek the services of a specific mediator. This would tend to simultaneously whittle away anything that wasn’t strictly directly related to the defense of person or property, while strengthening those remaining parts (since competition is more efficient than monopoly), resulting in something that would unconsciously grope toward an approximation of a market liberal order, even in the absence of conscious endeavor (and the Lawyers in the crowd would see that as an almost mystical proof of Natural Law, but that’s also wack).

But the same thing would tend to happen culturally. By subsuming more and more people from larger cultural and geographic groups into the process, and forcing them to reason and persuade in an open environment wherein individuals are presented with a realistic possibility to run to the highest ground, you dissolve taboos and meme-traps to wind up with a code that should tend toward something more respectful of rational individualism, irrespective of whatever local aberrations may have been there initially. That ties into what I meant earlier about competition giving people so many options to run to that it forces all options to become better, because it becomes harder to put the cultural clampdown on anyone.

You see, this is why I’m not a good writer. I just ramble. To answer your point, I can see reasoned, macro-level cosmopolitan sentiments manifesting themselves best through this kind of anarchist decentralization. You don’t need to choose between an (unstable) monopoly state or an (undesirable) organic tribe.

(+) It’s no surprise that most of humanity’s early philosophical development took place in violently antagonistic environments like ancient Greece, China, India, Renaissance Italy etc. Competition is just a way of reconstituting this dynamic without violence, anarchist peace being the perfection of what we now call war, as Proudhon would say. Marxism tries to wish this discord away rather than harness it as an engine of progress (and even they recognize that it an engine of progress, but only to envision an end state that transcends it).

Note: I’m the last person to say that cultural change doesn’t matter, but this system is likely to be the most stable and compatible form in which to help preserve and extend it. Certainly more than your description of decentralization would indicate.

In a loosely related note, I attended the Finding Our Roots anarchist convergence today and something in one of the workshops caught my ear, a word I hadn’t heard in a long time: Globalization. It was in the context of someone describing anarchism as advancing an alternative vision of globalization to the neoliberal one, and this person spoke in kind of a tongue-in-cheek fashion, because he knew that this had already become a cliche.

Now, left-libertarians do try to present themselves as real advocates of “free-trade”, “free-markets”, “privatization” and sometimes even “property rights”, all in an attempt to redeem these (more or less) valuable concepts from their hypocritical usurpers, and present them as an Unknown Ideal toward which we can aspire with all the genuine radicalism that it deserves.

But I’ve never seen left-libertarians do the same with globalization.

Isn’t it odd that a group of people who advocate mostly local, self-contained, territorial forms self-government and economic relations still felt that the word globalization was worth redeeming, and left-libertarians haven’t?

I think giving up on the anarchist project because of one specific instance in one specific scene where some folks failed to have a good response to an instance/charge of rape is a little, well disappointing.

No one ever pretended that the present-day movement has already found all the habits and organizational tendencies necessary to resolve every dilemma before a functioning society. Our only claim is that such models exist to be found.

I think these problems of justice can be solved theoretically but because of the emotional immediacy and the relative perpetuity of sexual assault in our culture the movement has opted for a trial and error approach with various cities trying various solutions and engaging in an — albeit limited — dialogue. There are collectives and mediating bodies in dozens of cities across the united states with experience dealing with precisely these kinds of situations, often to impressive ends. Your example is a classic one, but it’s one that’s recognized as such. For all of Social Anarchism’s annoying self-limitations they HAVE demonstrated over the last few decades a serious and proactive commitment to developing organic solutions. And as Market Anarchists we should be able to recognize that if even a free market can take a few iterations to generate and test solutions, a small cliquish group of people LARPing on weekends as though they were already in a free society might take a while longer.

The problem is not that there aren’t solutions, the problem is that these models and groups fall into disuse and their nuances aren’t conveyed to the next 3-year batch of radicals. Long distance (in time AND space) communication has never been Social Anarchism’s strong suit. But this is not a fundamental impediment but a reality of the movement’s size, culture and technological aptitude.

.

As to the rest.

I take seriously umbrage at your portrayal of the Social Anarchist movement as rife with naive kindness and idealism because of their largely pampered privileged bourgeois upbringings.

Practically everyone I work with or run into on a regular basis come from backgrounds of seriously fucked up shit. I may think I have the slightly worse extreme stories of childhood homelessness, starvation and abuse, and there may be an annoying rash of privileged upper working-class kids scattered around the scene for good measure, but I am really fucking sick of folks who briefly slum it with the cliques most immediately accessible to them and use such unrepresentative anecdotes to write off the entire movement.

It’s not about naivety. It’s precisely because we’re intimately aware of the sheer depth of horrors in the sociological/psychological composition of our society and how they function that we endeavor to prove another world is possible.

Yes America is a pretty damn amazing accomplishment and a great improvement. We can measure things against Anarchy, Full-blown consciousness-outlawed Fascism, or how things were previously in history. America obviously fails against the first but triumphs amazingly against the latters. As far as world empires we could have at this state of technological development America is practically a divine miracle.

But as you well know it’s a strawman to argue against Anarchists as though we want to immediately whisk away the state and its various forms of control. We’re not, nor have we ever, argued for some police-strike. The civilizing process will take some damn time. Probably millennia were we destined to remain at roughly this level of technological capacity.

That being true it’s tempting to throw up one’s hands and become a social democrat for the duration. (And we CAN argue for reformism and certain improved models of statism without being hypocrites.) But the reality is that the statist or liberal paradigm is one of fetishizing immediate advances or ameliorations in ignorance or apathy of their long term consequences. Simply put, the game of statist reform threatens to paint us into a corner from which we cannot emerge. Being an Anarchist is differentiated from Liberalism or Minarchism because while some of us may give to the EFF / ACLU, vote for lesser evils or get involved in political campaigns we navigate these contexts constantly mindful of our pursuit of an end far beyond them. We can’t choose means that cripple our ultimate ends.

Now, setting aside my editor hat and putting my contributor hat back on, a few notes on the discussion.

I’d still be interested in hearing from Soviet Onion whether he has anyone else in mind when he talks about a left-libertarian tendency to inappropriately fetishize localism and decentralism, and if so, who.

In reply to Aster, I oppose debt slavery, including debt slavery to pay off restitution. Otherwise, sounds fine, and, speaking as head of state and a supermajority of the provincial councils, I’m happy to incorporate it into the Bill of Rights of this secessionist republic of one. Probably was already hidden under a penumbra somewhere, but a little repetition never hurt anybody.

In reply to Soviet Onion, I agree with you, and you are unjust to your own writing. Except there’s no such thing as a meme-trap because there’s no such thing as memes. I agree that the non-territoriality of anarchist justice and defense associations, institutions for deliberating about right, and so on, is important to stress; decentralism means the lack of a fixed center, not a proliferation of millions of fixed centers with a small stretch of turf.

As for globalization, well, I dunno; but for what it’s worth, Southern Nevada ALL does distribute Free Trade Is Fair Trade and one of the main issues we focus on locally is immigration freedom. I agree that the discussion of counter-globalization or alternative globalization doesn’t get as much talk as it ought to, but I don’t think that tendencies among left-libertarians are really the problem here; I think the problem is one that exists throughout the anarchist movement, and that we’d be talking about it more if more of our interlocutors were bringing it up in their own conversations, and I agree with Shawn’s point in What ever happened to (the discourse on) Neoliberalism? that the critical narrative seems to have bumped into some obstacle in the collective memory of radicals. (Speaking only for myself, I suspect that the reasons why have a lot to do with the political events of the last 8 years, and with some bad decisions that we made, or that were made for us by our conversation partners, going into the anti-war movement.)

william:
Jeremy,
Gillis is right on: there is a growing rift in ALL. To me, it breaks down roughly along …
[2009-04-27 10:09:51 am]

anonymouse:
There's one premise that has to be at the bottom of anything that can be called "localism", and that is …
[2009-04-27 10:29:05 am]

Darian:
I’m glad this is being discussed, but unfortunately don’t have time for more than a few comments right now; hopefully …
[2009-04-27 10:38:12 am]

Marja Erwin:
My greatest concern with the social-anarchist movement was with the localism, and communalism, that can pervade collectivist and communist circles.
Left-libertarianism …
[2009-04-27 10:41:31 am]

Darian:
SO: Freedom means options for individuals, not the “right” of some reified community to enact boundaries around them according to …
[2009-04-27 10:42:50 am]

Keith Preston:
This is an article by a National-Anarchist explaining his views and how he developed them. Would anyone care to respond?
http://bayareanationalanarchists.com/blog/2009/04/national-anarchist-portraits-a.html
[2009-05-03 9:15:12 am]

I mean, one kind of decentralist politics that you might endorse would be to advocate the secession of urban centers from the surrounding states and a decentralist order that’s partly based on people forming a network of poleis around these urban centers. Certainly there are a number of cities (New York, San Francisco, Detroit, Austin, Atlanta …) where enough people are disgusted enough with their state governments that this kind of idea might have some real traction. After all, the power of suburban and exurban and rural counties to lord it over cities through majoritarian control of the state government is, or at least ought to be, just as much a concern for decentralists as the reverse.

Emboldened by Mayor Bloomberg’s testimony in Albany this week that the city’s
taxpayers pay the state $11 billion a year more than they get back, a City Council
member is offering legislation that would begin the process of having New York City
secede from New York State.

Peter Vallone Jr., a Democrat who represents Queens, is pushing the idea, and the
Council plans to hold a hearing on the possibility of making New York City the 51st state.

I think secession’s time has definitely come again, Mr. Vallone, who spearheaded a similar push in 2003, told The New York Sun yesterday. If not secession, somebody please tell me what other options we have if the state is going to continue to take billions from us and give us back pennies. Should we raise taxes some more? Should we cut services some more? Or should we consider seriously going out on our own?

During a visit to Albany this week, Mr. Bloomberg called on lawmakers to give the city its fair share of tax revenue and said that the state took in $11 billion more from New York City than was returned in the state budget. Mr. Vallone says that the state’s demands on the city in worsening economic times now make it necessary to dissolve the political bands, which have connected them.

Not only is it about self-determination and self-rule, but it’s about fairness, Mr. Vallone said. It’s something we see every year in the budget. They take $11 billion from us and give us back a mere pittance and they make it seem like they’re doing us a favor to give that pittance back. Somehow they missed the point that that is New York City’s own tax money and we deserve it.

Of course, Vallone is an elected Democrat, and like any politician, he takes a perfectly good radical idea and waters it down with stupid concessions to power: immediately after decrying the way majoritarian state government swindles people in New York City and denies them control over the fruits of their own labor, he goes on to propose that New York City ought to fix it by seceding from New York State, and then subordinating itself directly to the majoritarian rule of the United States federal government as the 51st state. I suppose there’s something to be said for cutting out the middle-man, but if you think that’s going to stop you from having billions taken from you and getting a pittance back, well, I have a fine bridge in the autonomous city-state of Brooklyn that you might be interested in buying.

And, like a politician, he proposes a stupid means to his stated ends:

Mr. Vallone’s legislation would create a commission to study the issue and then recommend whether to put it to a referendum. Since secession would have to be approved by the Albany legislators, its passage would be unlikely.

The idea of holding a direct referendum is fine; but making that referendum contingent on a politically-appointed council of Experts is a waste of time and energy. If you want New York City to be free, begging Albany to let your people go isn’t about to work. You’ve got to just start talking with your people about getting up and leaving, whether Albany likes it or not. I mean, Christ. Supposing that you talked it up and got it organized and actually had enough people in New York City behind you, what are they going to do about it? Boycott Manhattan? Invade the South Bronx? Why wait on their permission?

The answer, of course, is that this is most likely half-sincere at best, and in large part an act of pointless political grandstanding by Vallone, which he would not be attempting but for the fact hat he can be sure it won’t go anywhere. But even if his plan won’t, it’s very interesting, and worth the attention of genuine secessionists and real revolutionaries, that a party hack from Queens figures there’s enough of that kind of sentiment in his neighborhood that he can exploit it for an applause line. And that other dissident city council members would be willing to endorse the same logic in the course of public political debate:

Another to council member, Simcha Felder, who chairs the Governmental Operations committee, said the bill will be considered this year.

It certainly has merit, Mr. Felder said of the proposal. Why in the world should New York City be held hostage to the state? It just doesn’t make sense.

Mr. Felder acknowledged that the bill would face many hurdles, but said it deserved a debate.

I think the people in New York City are very interested for the most part in it. The question is the people outside New York City in New York State who have been eating the fruits of our labor for all this time. They aren’t going to be ready to just say forget about it.

So don’t give them the opportunity. Why choose a strategy that requires you to wait on them to get ready for your freedom? If the people in New York City really arevery interested, then do what every successful independence movement in history has done: stop worrying about what the people who oppress and exploit you will say about it. Get talking, get organized, declare independence and then, if the state keeps trying to issue you orders, act like you mean it — by ignoring those orders and treating the people who issue them the same way you’d treat any other lunatic who thinks he’s Napoleon. Of course, a strategy like that is hard. Of course, it’s likely to fail. (Lots of independence movements have.) Of course, it will take years to organize and win even if it doesn’t fail. But it is a strategy that might possibly succeed, which puts it ahead of plans for having the city government petition the state legislature. And it’s also a strategy we can start talking about now. And talking about that may start a lot of other conversations that are worth having, about taxes, war, empire, and the rest.

New York City ALLies: how many people do you know who are very interested in the idea of an independent New York City, which is no longer held hostage to the state? Remember that interest and sympathy and idle wishes are enough to start with: conviction and solidarity and organization are things that you can build by getting people to take the idea seriously, by educating them about it, by dispelling their ars, and by showing them that another City is possible. So, are there possibilities in doing anti-imperialist education, outreach, and, ultimately, organizing to free Occupied New York from the Empire State?

If so, let’s talk about how to do it. Maybe we can start in the comments here. Free the New York 8,274,527, and all political prisoners!

Coalitions of the Willing

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